How often do you see the beach ball or have programmes 'unexpectadly quit' ?

[john_satc]

hey -first excuse my poor spellings.
the main thing, is as the title says - how often do you see the beach ball or have programmes, well, crash?
reading the forum it seems that this hardly ever happens for most people. having had my iBook for around a month, i would say i have programmes crash around 4/5 times, ok much less than my old vaio but still more than i would expect.
second, the beach ball! so annoying! i get this quite often! usually when i want to save an item, which is annoying as i dont see what could be slowing the comp down!? i press 'save' and it takes 10-20 seconds of beach ball to receive the save window. or, when i just tried 'adding photos' to my iPhoto library i had the beack ball for almost 2 minutes! its really annoying!!
is there anything i can do to stop these happening? i have 512 RAM so that should not be a big problem, any other ideas?
thanks, john

[Nermal]

Did your system come with 512 MB or did you upgrade it yourself? What brand is it? Cheap memory can cause stability issues. Also, 512 MB isn't really that much :eek: - I had 1.25 GB and noticed a significant slowdown when I went down to 768 MB.

[wrldwzrd89]

I get beachballs infrequently and unexpected quits often. QuickTime Player is by FAR the program that unexpectedly quits on me the most, and it only does this when playing certain MIDI files.

[john_satc]

Did your system come with 512 MB or did you upgrade it yourself? What brand is it? Cheap memory can cause stability issues. Also, 512 MB isn't really that much :eek: - I had 1.25 GB and noticed a significant slowdown when I went down to 768 MB.

No it came with 256 so i went to an Apple store in birmingham. its not like an apple store owned by apple, but another company runs it and calls itself apple. anyway, i just went in and asked for more RAM - i didnt really know what to say as im not a wiz with comps etc - i didnt even no wat RAm was to recently. anyway, i just looked at my recpeipt and it was - 256MB PC2100 DDR SODIMM Module, costing me £35.
Its all i can afford at the moment as i am poor college student who :( i only got an iBook after my holiday was cancelled! anyway, i don't need lots of RAM as in not a heavy user. just iPhoto, iTunes 24/7, internet, typing and the odd DVD. nothing much.

oh PS it was an 'Apple Centre' run by KRCS Retail LTD

[aloofman]

I don't get that many beachballs, at least not many that last more than a couple seconds. But I get plenty of application quits, especially Word and IE. (No surprise there.) Among non-MS apps, Safari quits on me the most.

[andiwm2003]

I get beachballs infrequently and unexpected quits often. QuickTime Player is by FAR the program that unexpectedly quits on me the most, and it only does this when playing certain MIDI files.

since i upgraded to 1.25 GB and 10.3.8 i get the beachball for 1 or 2 seconds twice a week or so (meaning it happens so rarely that i don't care).
before that a little more beachball but never often enough to care about. uptime several days or even weeks between restarts.

I only had crash's when my 1 GB DIMM (bought at the Apple store!!!) was faulty. No crash since then (3 weeks, 3 restarts or so).

andi

[Fredstar]

Programmes crash atleast once a week for me, usually Firefox. Mail has crashed about twice, iphoto once (the book bug in iphoto 5), Freeway pro has once, and Word does now and again. So it varies but the Apple apps are v stable.
Since you are a newbie, repairing permissions may help - applicatons--utilities--disk utility--repair permissions
and also if you are having one particular app crashing then it could be that the prefs have been corrupted so into finder--library--preferences and delete the preferences of the application. Unforunately this will lose all your presets but preferences rarely get corrupted but can cause instability.

[jalagl]

I do get the same behavior very often, mostly with Safari. I do get the beachball a lot - my computer is not cutting edge, but it has gotten worse and worse with Panther, starting I think with 10.3.6 or .7.

[Daveway]

Safari has done it to me 2x since November. But, only Safari :rolleyes:

[pubwvj]

How often do you see the beach ball or have programmes, well, crash?

Primarily in Safari and Mail is where I see the beach ball. Once in a while Safari locks up and I must do a force quit after waiting for ten or fifteen minutes to see if it will come out of it. Safari also occasionally (weekly) does an unexpected quit. Almost no other programs do either of these for me.

[zimtheinvader]

I get the beachball a lot, esp when opening media files or using audio apps/safari. For me this is (?curously) a fairly recent phenomenon. Apps unexpectedly quit about 3-5x per week for me (mostly Ableton Live). Mine is a G4 800/1024mb PC133. More ram always seems to help (at least >=1GB) though. :confused:

[IJ Reilly]

This will be a familiar answer to anyone who's read the other beach ball thread, but...

If you get persistent beach balls, try (1) logging out or rebooting, (2) repairing permissions, or (3) quitting resource-hungry applications.

If the situation persists, I'd run fsck on the drive.

[Vader]

Word and Powerpoint unexpectedly quit for me all the time, but that is no surprise!
I get the beach ball in Safari when I open a lot of tabs.

[john1123]

i don't get beachballs too often, only when i have too many apps running. Firefox and safari are the two programs that just wont stop quitting on me.

[anotherjeff]

Word likes to quit on me about once every 2 weeks (I use it for a couple of hours every day).
I do have a gig of Fry's ram that I installed myself.
I did repair permissions pretty recently, I don't know if that would change anything.
No regular pattern of the good old beachball.

[Sweetfeld28]

I mostly only get the beach ball in Safari. However, i do get the "application has unexpectedly quit" mostly in iTunes. I think that itunes has quit twice on me since the last update of iTunes.

[biohazard6969]

AAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGG!!!!!!!!!! ok for the last day or so, iphoto, whenever i start it up, i get the damn spinning beach ball of death while it says that its loading the pictures and it slows down the whole system and it basically stalls for like 30 seconds and i cna't do nething. then it will say that iphoto has unexpectedly quit....once i ran activity monitor while it was doint this and the app turned red and it said in brackets beside it "(hung)".......i tried repairing permissions and this did nothing, i rele need iphoto to get at my pics and i would rele apprciate if someone could point me in the right direction so that i might be able to get this fixed thx :eek:

[IJ Reilly]

Did you try the other three suggestions also?

[john_satc]

Programmes crash atleast once a week for me, usually Firefox. Mail has crashed about twice, iphoto once (the book bug in iphoto 5), Freeway pro has once, and Word does now and again. So it varies but the Apple apps are v stable.
Since you are a newbie, repairing permissions may help - applicatons--utilities--disk utility--repair permissions
and also if you are having one particular app crashing then it could be that the prefs have been corrupted so into finder--library--preferences and delete the preferences of the application. Unforunately this will lose all your presets but preferences rarely get corrupted but can cause instability.

I repair permissions weekly, after reading on this forum that you should. so that should not be the problem.
thanks tho

[Dagless]

a few apps crashed like silly when i first got my machine namely Word and co., installed 10.3.8 and now its fine. havnt tampered with any ram either.
actually Windows Media Player crashes like mad still...

[biohazard6969]

yea i tried the others but what is an fsck or w/e its called.....i'm a bit of a dum-dum :)

[bont]

My imac g5 has been freezing like crazy lately....that beachball thing has become too familiar a sight, looking through the console logs I'm convinced it's something to do with my adsl modem but aside from the usual tests I can't see what I can do about it.

[iGary]

I've had major beach ball and lock up problems with iPhoto 5.

I loaded about 5,000 images from our server and it locks up and behaves very poorly. Everything else (except MS Word) pretty much performs flawlessly.

I'm loading the images directly onto my hard drive as we speak, and purchased a large stick of RAM for the iMac this morning, so hopefully that will help.

I'm real retentive about forcing periodic maintenance scripts and repairing permissions along with prebinding and PRAM, so my machines give me few problems.

I'm not liking the new iPhoto, though. We have about 7,000 aerials of the East Coast and the only thing I use iPhoto for is to be able to scroll through them quickly.

[IJ Reilly]

yea i tried the others but what is an fsck or w/e its called.....i'm a bit of a dum-dum :)

Sorry... I should have explained. Reboot and hold down the cmd (apple) and S keys. Instead of the normal startup screen, you'll soon see a screen of white characters on a black background (you can release the keys now). You are now in Single User Mode. When the screen stops scrolling, you'll be at a command line prompt. Type:

fsck -f (including the space before the dash! and) [return]

The hard drive will be checked for errors and repaired if possible. If errors are found but the drive could not be repaired, run fsck again until they are repaired. (Sometimes it takes more than one pass.) Then at the prompt type:

reboot [return]

Another suggestion I make often is to download this utility:

http://versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/19596

It installs a script you can run in Single User Mode that automatically runs a number of maintenance routines, including fsck. Very handy.

[vieoray]

i get the beachball most often in safari, but i find that updating the prebindings regularly dramatically reduces any beachball action. and by dramatic, i mean i hardly ever see it anymore.

as for unexpected quits, mail sometimes quits, but lately ive been having a recurring problem with safari and yahoo. everytime i try to visit yahoo, safari unexpectedly quits. not sure what the deal is.

[gekko513]

I just got a 1.42 GHz Mac mini with 512MB of RAM. I also have a 1GHz PowerBook 12" with 768MB of RAM.

The first couple of days on the Mac mini I thought it was a bit slow, and I saw the beachball a lot more often than on my PowerBook.

This was bugging me a bit, but my Mac mini and I adjusted after a while, and we're now friends most of the time. The trick seems to be to hit cmd+w or even cmd+q a bit more often to keep down the number of windows and applications. :D

[Floyd WHO]

i get the beachball most often in safari, but i find that updating the prebindings regularly dramatically reduces any beachball action. and by dramatic, i mean i hardly ever see it anymore.

as for unexpected quits, mail sometimes quits, but lately ive been having a recurring problem with safari and yahoo. everytime i try to visit yahoo, safari unexpectedly quits. not sure what the deal is.

By reading MR I figued out what permissions were and how to fix them, but prebinding are a first for me. What are they and does disk utility fix them??
As for crashes Iphoto just quit on me trying to import a library across a wireless network but that's the first in a long time.

[IJ Reilly]

By reading MR I figued out what permissions were and how to fix them, but prebinding are a first for me. What are they and does disk utility fix them??
As for crashes Iphoto just quit on me trying to import a library across a wireless network but that's the first in a long time.

Here's a brief thread on prebindings:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=99943

If you ask me, this is first order Mac voodoo. I can't imagine how it could fix a problem not related to a crash during an application installation.

[jkeithh]

I don't get that many beachballs, at least not many that last more than a couple seconds. But I get plenty of application quits, especially Word and IE. (No surprise there.) Among non-MS apps, Safari quits on me the most.

I have to agree that Safari is my biggest offender too. Yahoo Messenger ranks second.

[Mr. Durden]

:eek:
I think I'm in the minority here. My G5 very rarely does the beachball thing or quits or freezes up. I do get the beachball for a few seconds every once in a while, but nothing that screws up my system. Over the past year it may have frozen once or twice, and maybe I've gotten the unexpected quit a handful of times (4-5 times). Mostly while using Final Cut.

I've got 4GB RAM, so that may help. (?)

[Apple]

I have 512 mb ram and the app that freezes up the most is Safari. Once, I had finder unexpectedly quit, and I had to do a force restart. But that happened like 2 months ago.

[IJ Reilly]

I have 512 mb ram and the app that freezes up the most is Safari. Once, I had finder unexpectedly quit, and I had to do a force restart. But that happened like 2 months ago.

You shouldn't have to do a hard shutdown if the Finder quits -- you should still have access to a reboot from the Apple menu. Are you sure that's what happened?

BTW, another useful tip: keep the Activity Monitor in the Dock. Even the Finder goes to la-la land as it does once in a while, you'll probably still have access to the Dock and be able to kill stuck processes. I've seen the WindowServer process get stuck on rare occasions. Kill it from the Activity Monitor and you're back in business.

[superbovine]

hey -first excuse my poor spellings.
the main thing, is as the title says - how often do you see the beach ball or have programmes, well, crash?
reading the forum it seems that this hardly ever happens for most people. having had my iBook for around a month, i would say i have programmes crash around 4/5 times, ok much less than my old vaio but still more than i would expect.
second, the beach ball! so annoying! i get this quite often! usually when i want to save an item, which is annoying as i dont see what could be slowing the comp down!? i press 'save' and it takes 10-20 seconds of beach ball to receive the save window. or, when i just tried 'adding photos' to my iPhoto library i had the beack ball for almost 2 minutes! its really annoying!!
is there anything i can do to stop these happening? i have 512 RAM so that should not be a big problem, any other ideas?
thanks, john

Your question is subjective an open to many different answers because you lack specifics program you are using. You problem is probably a function of the program(s) you are using, and what you doing rather than a broad poll of weather or not you get a 'beach ball' or not.

[bont]

I have 512 mb ram and the app that freezes up the most is Safari. Once, I had finder unexpectedly quit, and I had to do a force restart. But that happened like 2 months ago.
Sorry for going a bit of topic, but I'm amazed that the username "Apple" hasn't been used before now

[yellow]

is there anything i can do to stop these happening? i have 512 RAM so that should not be a big problem, any other ideas?
thanks, john

A lot of it has to do with what applications you're using that beachball.

A beachball is thrown up by the UIServer when an application isn't responding in a timely manner. There could be "legitimate" reasons for this, a slow network, a carbonized app, a poorly written app, no free CPU cycles..

[john_satc]

Your question is subjective an open to many different answers because you lack specifics program you are using. You problem is probably a function of the program(s) you are using, and what you doing rather than a broad poll of weather or not you get a 'beach ball' or not.

hi, ok ill be more specific.
i get the beachball when trying to save in iWorks mainly, however i do often see the beachball when using iPhoto. Crashing occurs especially with safari, ms word- which i have now uninstalled, and iWorks.

Some people have mentioned having too many aplications running. Most of my beach balls/crashes occur when iTunes, Mail, iWorks, safari and messenger is open. Is that a lot of programmes to have running???

thanks for the response everyone!

[Lord Blackadder]

I don't see the beachball too much, and have rarely had an app unexpectedly quit - I'd say it happened in Safari a couple times and once in Garageband to my knowledge. All incidents occured during heavy multitasking, so it's hard to pin down the source, though it happens so seldom I'm not concerned.

The beachball issue on an iBook is usually a RAM issue - you'd be better off with more RAM preferaby 768MB or more (the more the merrier). However, as others have stated, the beachball doesn't always indicate an inherent performance issue - something just might be stalled or working inefficiently (sloppy code or network lag).

[cheekyspanky]

My Mac mini arrived on Wednesday - a 1.42Ghz with 512mb RAM.

So far I've had Safari crash once and iPhoto crash once (asking do i want to send feedback to Apple etc). Mail has also closed of its own accord once. I've also had the beachball of doom or whatever it's known as..) quite a few times when using iPhoto. I do have 6000 photos, but Picasa2 coped okay with it on my PC with 256mb RAM!

Also when I transfer photos to the trash folder in iPhoto my mini makes a faint sqealing noise..but I've only heard this when moving photos..any ideas what it could be?!

[gekko513]

Some people have mentioned having too many aplications running. Most of my beach balls/crashes occur when iTunes, Mail, iWorks, safari and messenger is open. Is that a lot of programmes to have running???
Nah, I wouldn't say so, but some of those applications can use a lot of memory just by themselves, which could cause beachballs when switching between them.

I expect that iWorks will use a lot of memory if you work on documents that are high in multimedia content. Safari will use a lot of memory if you have lots of tabs or lots of windows open with flash ads and the like. If your iTunes library is huge, then iTunes will also use a lot of memory, as will Mail if your mailboxes contains thousands of mails.

If not, then it should'nt be a problem.

Side note: I just found out that my file permissions got a totally screwed up because I imported all files, settings and applications from my PowerBook to my Mac mini on first setup. Repair permissions fixed thousands of files. Also, an execution of update_prebinding said that it fixed 1370 prebindings, but I don't know if those were already fixed and was just refixed.

[gekko513]

... I do have 6000 photos, but Picasa2 coped okay with it on my PC with 256mb RAM! ...

That's quite amazing. How do you browse the photos in Picasa2? There must be some technique that lets it run smoothly with so little RAM.