I have a new MacBook Pro 2.53 Ghz with 4Gb memory. The laptop came with a 260Gb hard drive which I have upgraded to a 460Gb drive.
Occasionally, the 'spinning beach ball' shows up and the system 'hangs' for a half minute or so. Then everything works fine.
It isn't when I am using a resource intensive program, it happens when I am using iTunes, OR iPhoto, Or a word processing program. (Please note, not necessarily all of those at the same time, it can happen when a single program is running).
Surely a MacBook Pro with 4GB of memory should handle just about anything I can throw at it?
Is there a problem with the machine, the disk, the motherboard?
I have run disk repair utilities and Onyx with no improvement.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Fred

Lts of these hangs can be helped by Verrifying the disk and/or permissions. To do this you will have to boot from an external mac system disk or a third party utility like Disk Warrior

Lts of these hangs can be helped by Verrifying the disk and/or permissions. To do this you will have to boot from an external mac system disk or a third party utility like Disk Warrior

I have done this, unfortunately without benefit.
Is it likely to be a software problem or a hardware thing. Could it be the upgrade to the hard drive that caused it?
If it is software, would it be beneficial to install Snow Leopard?
Fred

I do not see the ard drive upgrade as a probable cause.
I think the next step would be to try and isolate the problem. What are you doing when the problem occurs? Is it the same action or dose it just hang while you are doing different task. 4GBof memory should allow you to run several applications simultaneously still keeping a good level of performance..
If you can isolate the problem to one application reinstall the effected application if it appears on more than one app verify that ram is seaed and functioning you can run the Apple hardware test by booting while holding down the "d" key with the original system install disk in the optical drive. If the hardware test out reinstalation of the original operating system would be a good next step. I would try to solve the problem before updating to Snow Leopard.