I recently installed a new 240 GB Samsung SSD on my macbook pro. After installing, I backed up from my time machine back up. Upon reinstalling, I noticed that when using Safari or playing Hearthstone, there are very frequent freezes where the mouse shows the mac beach ball and everything on screen is unresponsive (but the sound continues).

I already tried verifying and repairing the hard drive, but the SSD seems fine. I re-installed OS X Yosemite and a clean install still has the persistent freezes.

I notice that unplugging the external monitor helps reduce the amount of freezing, which makes me believe that it is due to the graphics card in my system is flawed.

Has anyone ever seen this issue? Is it possible that I may have frayed a wire or something? I'm not a hardware expert - I was wondering if there's any obvious error that would cause this and if there's an easy fix.

Thanks!