Nothing works my beachball is spinning all the time

Question

I have a MacBook Pro and upgraded to Yosemite a few weeks ago. The first week was a learning process but it has been impossible since then. Literally every task I try to do I have the beachball spinning, SAFARI, GOOGLE, BOOKMARKS, WORD, EXCEL, ITUNES, ALL OF THEM. I wait FOR several to many minutes for something to open and then the beachball appears again and I cannot even type my entry for another minute or two. My computer is basically unusable.
If we are all having this problem, who won't have this problem with Yosemite? Is Apple trying to crash the world? I have been glad to read on many posts in other strings that many of you have more ram than I do (4) as it has been suggested to me by Apple that I buy more ram - but obviously that does no good.
In describing Yosemite problems many posts only mention "MAIL," and recommend disabling various parts of it. BUT I don't even use apple/google mail so I don't even have the icon referred to on my Activity Monitor. (I am using Entourage)

Answer 1

Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad and start typing the name.
The title of the Console window should be All Messages. If it isn't, select
          SYSTEM LOG QUERIES ▹ All Messages
from the log list on the left. If you don't see that list, select
          View ▹ Show Log List
from the menu bar at the top of the screen.
Click the Clear Display icon in the toolbar. Then take an action that isn't working the way you expect. Select any messages that appear in the Console window. Copy them to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Paste into a reply to this message by pressing command-V.
The log contains a vast amount of information, almost all of which is irrelevant to solving any particular problem. When posting a log extract, be selective. A few dozen lines are almost always more than enough.
Please don't indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.
Please don't post screenshots of log messages—post the text.
Some private information, such as your name or email address, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.