Macbook Pro running slowly/freezing

So, I got my Macbook Pro late August of last year. It's been fine until a few weeks ago when it would start freezing up a lot (the beach ball always appearing) and oftentimes I would have to force quit (in Safari). Sometimes, when I scroll down a page with the two finger scroll, it lags a little and the beach ball comes up. Finally, when I try to swtich tabs in Safari, oftentimes freezes up. I thought Macs were relatively good in these areas? What can I do to fix these slowups?

if you're maybe running more stuff at once and you don't have much space on your hard drive, it will get slow, veery slow ... you could always try running some cleaning tools like Onyx ... not much to help you though, sry :-(

well, do macs get spyware, worms, trojans, etc like windows? If not, why would it run so slowly? My computer is pretty new, and I don't run that many programs at once (I also have 2gb ram)

I had a similar problem on my brand new MBP. It turned out it was my HDD so I swapped it out and now it is fast. I doubt this is your problem. I agree with scathe. Try Onyx also check your permissions.