Having random issues - spinning ball, won't shutdown, network connectivity...

hello all,

I have an early 2009 Macbook Pro. 2.4Ghz Came with 2GB ram and 320GB hard drive which I had upgraded to 4GB and 500GB quite a few months ago. My one year warranty has expired and I did not purchase additional applecare.

Lately, I'm getting the spinning beach ball a lot. Completely random, I have not found it consistent to any particular application.

Also, I use my mac both at work and at home. When I fire it up and either location, it never had any problems grabbing a new IP address from the router. This was all automatic. Now, I have to either turn airport off then back on, or go into network preferences and manually renew the DCHP address.

And finally, only lately it has not been shutting down all the time. It will log out of my desktop, but will get stuck on a blue screen with spinning icon. It will sit there for hours if I let it. After 20 minutes I usually get fed up and hold the power button down for five seconds to manually turn it off.

I've done the regular suggestions such as verify and repair disk permissions. I'm considering a PRAM reset, but would like more info as to exactly what that does.

I'm also considering wiping the hard drive completely and re-installing from scratch. But that may just be the Windows troubleshooting idea in me (I'm a Windows Server and network administrator).

Any other ideas or suggestions? TIA!

Boot the MBP from the Install disk and run a hardware check with Disk Utility.

Zapping the PRAM resets system defaults such as date/time, and I doubt (but can't be sure) that it's related to the shutdown issue. PRAM is not related to network settings. See this article Mac OS X: What's stored in PRAM.

Hold off reinstalling the OS until you've checked the hardware.

Do as hughvane suggests, run Repair Disk in particular to check out your HDD. Sounds like it is failing.

I will do that tonight and report back with the results. Thanks!