Grrr......the Spinning Pizza Pie icon is driving me nuts

I've been a HUGE advocate of Macs for years. And up until now I've had no problems with them.
But my iMac is acting like a Windows PC and it's driving me nuts.
Basically, the issue is this: for no predictable reason and several times a day, my Mac will display the spinning pinwheel "working" icon for 20-30 seconds. Of course it seems like an eternity when you're working and doing something productive.
Thinking that it might be hard-drive-space related, I moved ALL my songs, photos and videos to external hard drives and now have 80Gb free. The problem persists.
Anyone else had this problem and know how to solve it?
Thanks in advance

Hi Tony
How many and which App's are trying to run on 2GB of ram?
When your start seeing the spinning beach ball check both your RAM usage and Page outs using the Activity Monitor:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1342?viewlocale=en_US
If all or most of your ram is used up as Active (no free or inactive) then you will see the spinning beach ball when VM Pages in/out to the Hard Drive.
Dennis

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