It is also a good idea to tell the Mathematica kernel and front end to start out with a fair bit of memory. In the Mathematica folder, click (just once) on the Mathematica icon, pull down the File menu, select the "Get Info" entry, and in the window that pops up, set the preferred memory size to 10000K. Do the same for the Mathematica Kernel, but set its preferred memory size to 15000K.