Brand new Mac with constant "beach ball" action

I just recieved my new 13" Aluminum MacBook w/ 2 ghz and 2 gigs of RAM. I have only had this thing for 2 days and it consistently runs slow and has that rotating beach ball every 2 minutes. I don't have anything extra on it and I have read almost every post in this forum looking for an answer. What can I do to slim this thing up and fix this problem. First time with a Mac and would like to have a good experience with it. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

Something must be slowing it down. What have you installed?

Open up Activity Monitor (/Applications/Utilities/) and see what the culprit is.

Or maybe you can try to "relaunch" the Finder if the Activity Monitor doesn't tell you that there is anything wrong.

How about repairing permissions and Disk Verify - both within Applications>Utilities>Disk Utility. A tip, to disk verify the HD (you cannot repair the startup disk) and it shows that after running, a repair to the HD is required (error will be shown in red type), you will need to insert the OS X Install Disk 1 and restart holding down "C" to use the DVD as the startup disk. Only then can you repair the HD, after canceling out the install it wants to do at start up. At the top will be Utilities I believe it says and you will find Disk Utility there.