Systems seem to hang on occasion ......

....for no apparent reason.
Just new to the Mac and on the whole I'm enjoying the kit and currently beasting through an Aperture trial as I bought the Mac for photos primarily. One thing that is concerning me though is that on occassion the Mac will go into that little beach ball malarkey when you are trying to load a web page or open a mail. It will then hang for up to a minute. Most irritating and reminiscent of the behaviour that lead to the exile of my PC. The unit is a 2.4 GHz iMac with 2Gb of RAM, two hard drives attached with one used as the Time Machine. The problem is occuring when there are no other apps (like Aperture) running. Any thoughts?

Cheers.

Have you tried running software update to get the latest software and fixes?

try and verify your permissions...

I've gotten the software on daily updates; so that's squared away. I also managed to find the Verify disk thingy in utilities so I did that last night and all seems to be well with the world today.

Sorry for a dumb question, but what did I do when I was verifying permissions??

OS X will not work if certain system files, and critical applications, have incorrect file permissions. Disk Utility allows you to check for and fix any possible problems.

http://www.osxfaq.com/DailyTips/10-2004/10-06.ws