Freezing and Rainbow Wheel after watching videos.

Question

My Macbook mid 2010, 17", 8GBRAM, MAC OSX 10.6.8, keeps freeziing and the rainbow wheel appears anytime I watch a few minutes (usually 5-30 minutes) of videos on various search engines, softwares or whatever they're called (divx, quicktime, vuze etc..) 
The computer is running at normal speed, and I think it doesn't do it when I'm doing other things on the computer that doesn't involve watching videos.  I just got a new hard drive since the original one failed last month, don't know if that's relavent. Updated some plugins thinking that might be it, but it still happens.  Can't press cmd opt esc to force quit or shut down.  Have to hold down the power button to turn it off and restart to get away from the frozen spinning rainbow.  It doesn't stop spinning but remains frozen even after several minutes and beyond.  Will probably continue to be frozen if I let it continue without shutting it off via power button.
Any insights most welcome. 

Answer 1

You need to free up some hard drive space.  Rule of thumb: You should never let your hard drive get to where you have only 10-15% of space left.
Seven ways to free up drive space
Where did my  Disk Space  go?
Slimming your hard drive
OmniDiskSweeper is a free utility that checks HD space.
FreeSpace cost $1 or is a free utility that checks HD space.
SpaceControl is a free utility that checks HD space.
FreeSpace cost $.99 - FreeSpace shows you how much space is available on all local, connected, and network drives with a single click.