Safari driving me mad!

Hello all,
Since this afternoon my Safari has developed a very irritating problem. After a random period of time (can be 5 seconds, or 20 minutes) it randomly stops loading content on the page and starts the spinning wheel. Whilst I can click between my tabs I can not load any new pages or scroll down on the tabs that I have open.
It has only started this afternoon and I have changed nothing that I can think would cause such a situation. The only thing that has been changed recently is I had a replacement SuperDrive fitted yesterday, however Safari was working fine last night after the repairs. My machine is a MacBook Pro running 10.8.3, and Safari is 6.0.3.
Closing Safari down and re-opening it remedies the situation, but for how long seems to be at Safari's discretion. Like I said, sometimes it can be fine for upto 20 minutes, other times a matter of seconds.
I have done the following in an attempt to remedy the problem:
Rebooted my laptop (twice)
Closed Safari and told it not to reopen my tabs
Cleared the cache file

Any help would be appreciated
Thank you

Chris

Do you have another browser installed that you can try? I keep several browsers installed just for those times when one of them starts acting up. If you only have Safari, try downloading Chrome or Firefox to see if the same thing happens. You might also want to boot to your recovery partition and verify your hard drive using Disk Utility.

And how much free space is there on nthat hard drive if it checks out okay?

Thanks for the replies guys,

I dont really have another browser installed, but may give it a try. However the hand gestures aren't as compatible with other browsers, nor can I easily use iCloud with them.
Ill give the disk check a go though!
As for the free space, I have just over 30GB free. That should be plenty, should it not?

Thanks
Chris

Well not really. Depends on the size of the drive. 30GB would be okay for up to 120GB drive, inadequate for more. Rule of thumb bis 15-20% of the drive's capacity as free space for the drive to work anywhere near capacity. Others will advise up to 25%.

Jumping jellybeans! Okay, ill have a little clear up. To be honest its been long overdue and I've been putting it off for a long time.
Ill give it a go.

Thank you
Chris