Freakin' pinwheel of death on new alumibook w/4GB Ram. WHY?!?!

[mac-a-delic]

Please, please, please, can someone enlighten me?

I just got a new aluminum macbook (the less expensive one) from work about a month ago. They also bought me a 4GB ram set, which the notebook is recognizing as 4GB, per the "about this mac" section.

However, I get a freaking pinwheel about every hour or so, and I can't figure out why.

I am a heavy system user with Firefox 3, Entourage, Word and often iTunes running at the same time. Now I know firefox is a memory beast, but with 4GB of ram?

Plus, the pinwheel usually occurs while using Firefox, but it will also happen when I'm using other programs, even Word. It's like it just gets constipated over the smallest thing, like clicking on one thing and then another too soon.

The reason I'm so frustrated is that this thing is the cutting-edge laptop with maxed out ram and it is performing worse than my old white macbook 13".

I've seen some of the other complaints about the new alumibooks, but mine is built well (no creeking, noise, loose battery covers, etc.). It's just this stupid pinwheel. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!

Thanks in advance.

[vincebio]

i know this happens when you dont allow spotlight to index correctly when you start using it..

i would suggest leaving your computer on all night to allow the cron scripts to run and your spotlight to index at the same time...
make sure it doesnt go to sleep

hope this helps....other than that, you may have 4gb of ram being recognised but it might be dodgy

[California]

Please, please, please, can someone enlighten me?

I just got a new aluminum macbook (the less expensive one) from work about a month ago. They also bought me a 4GB ram set, which the notebook is recognizing as 4GB, per the "about this mac" section.

However, I get a freaking pinwheel about every hour or so, and I can't figure out why.

I am a heavy system user with Firefox 3, Entourage, Word and often iTunes running at the same time. Now I know firefox is a memory beast, but with 4GB of ram?

Plus, the pinwheel usually occurs while using Firefox, but it will also happen when I'm using other programs, even Word. It's like it just gets constipated over the smallest thing, like clicking on one thing and then another too soon.

The reason I'm so frustrated is that this thing is the cutting-edge laptop with maxed out ram and it is performing worse than my old white macbook 13".

I've seen some of the other complaints about the new alumibooks, but mine is built well (no creeking, noise, loose battery covers, etc.). It's just this stupid pinwheel. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!

Thanks in advance.

What brand of hard drive is in your mac book? Toshiba, hitachi, fujistu?

[bigjnyc]

I hate firefox, the only time i ever seen a pinwheel on any of my Macs is when using firefox. I just stick to safari its a zillion times better for me. I dont need any plugins or whatever else makes firefox appealing to people.

[msprouls]

I had a similar problem and fixed it by reinstalling the flash player and then repairing permissions. Not sure if that will help you but it did me

[mac-a-delic]

California, my HD is a Toshiba. I had a friend suggest that I set my preferences to prevent it from going to sleep whenever possible, which I did. Pinwheel continues.

bigjnyc, I've tried switching to Safari, but Safari uploads pretty slowly too. The pinwheel was less frequent, but I've gotten it and with just normal non-Internet related programs.

msprouls, I did an HD permissions repair, but have not reinstalled the flash player.

I appreciate all of your help. I'll try these things, but I have a feeling I just need to call AppleCare.

Thanks, again.

mac-a-delic

[aethelbert]

I really doubt that this has anything to do with RAM. Even if you have fifty-seven petaflops of memory, you can still beachball with bad software. Try checking permissions, reinstalling, et al. If you're not convinced, check your ram usage in Activity Monitor. I don't get the feeling that calling AppleCare will be any help as this doesn't seem to be a hardware issue.

[wheezy]

Pinwheel happens, I have 6GB on my MacPro and I still get it. RAM gets full, info gets shuffled to the hard drive. Browsers do use a lot of memory. Check your Page in/Page out count; you can do that via Terminal or download the iStat widget as that displays it.

I also think that browsers just automatically send data from the RAM to your OS Scratch if you haven't checked that page for awhile whether there is RAM available or not. Sometimes I'll have a page open in a tab for a day or two before going back to reference it or whatever and I'll get a beachball for a second.

So, take some activity monitor screenshots right after you beachball, let us know your page count and let's see if we can't fix this for you :)

[The Samurai]

For whats its worth - OP, I think I may be in a similar position.

I only get the 'pinwheel of death' when I am using the internet at a wireless network. Its absolutely fine when I am using it via ethernet.

The 'pinwheel' annoys the hell out of me, and yes it happens on Firefox. Safari - although i don't get the pinwheel of death, it takes time to load a website.

I've got the alu macbook 2.0 and my hard drive is the Fujitsu and i've got 2 gigs of RAM (personally, I dont think its anything to do with RAM).

[imac9556]

Hey guys,
go to:
http://www.titanium.free.fr/pgs2/english/onyx_leopard.html

hit the maintenance tab, make sure all the options are checked and click execute. It "optimizes" the computer and fixes my problems on my MacbookPro and iMac when it had this issue.
The utility is free and very good

[neiltc13]

Yet another person falls into the trap (which has been perpetuated in part by some users of this forum) of thinking that 4GB RAM will solve every problem. It's just unfortunate that folks don't realise that 1GB is more than enough to meet most people's everyday needs.

[amrk47]

this usually always happens in firefox

i suggest fully quiting firefox frequently and restarting

[dwsolberg]

Go to add-ons and disable Flash. If the pinwheel stops, you have your cause.

[deputy_doofy]

Don't know if RAM is your issue or not, but bad RAM will cause numerous issues and NONE of them will seem like RAM issues. Just an FYI.

[RS1999ent]

For whats its worth - OP, I think I may be in a similar position.

I only get the 'pinwheel of death' when I am using the internet at a wireless network. Its absolutely fine when I am using it via ethernet.

The 'pinwheel' annoys the hell out of me, and yes it happens on Firefox. Safari - although i don't get the pinwheel of death, it takes time to load a website.

I've got the alu macbook 2.0 and my hard drive is the Fujitsu and i've got 2 gigs of RAM (personally, I dont think its anything to do with RAM).

Just wanted to chime in here and say that I see a very similar problem with my early-2008 macbook pro. I get the pinwheel of death when using the wireless connection for an extended period of time. I don't run firefox however; usually, I only have Safari, and several ssh connections open when the problem occurs. Unfortunately, I was never able to find a fix, so I've resorted to turning off airport and using a wired connection whenever I know I'm going to use the laptop for a while.

I did get as far as tracing my problem to the Yukon wireless driver. It seems like this driver, for whatever reason, eventually craps out, thus causing the system to crash. Check out my previous post here:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=577905

The system.log entry tells me that the problem might be due to a memory leak in the wireless driver, but I don't see any symptoms that would lead me to suspect this as the root cause. That is, the pinwheel of death is not preceded by a period of unresponsiveness or excessive paging.

Do any of you see something similar?

[SnowLeopard2008]

Yet another person falls into the trap (which has been perpetuated in part by some users of this forum) of thinking that 4GB RAM will solve every problem. It's just unfortunate that folks don't realise that 1GB is more than enough to meet most people's everyday needs.

not really, at least for me. I had 1GB stock, and running more than a few apps at the same time will beach ball. To OP: if possible, maybe a fresh install of Leopard? Or just check activity monitor and see which process is taking your cpu cycles, since the more cpu cycles an app uses, the more chance of beach balls.

[California]

Apple told me about my aluminum macbook beachballing that the OS that comes on the oem hard drive sometimes is corrupted because it is not loaded by a disc but by some computerized method.

Told me to re install Leopard. This shouldn't be happening tho, maybe it is an internet issue?

[StuBeck]

I get pinwheels a lot, not just with Firefox but with things like textedit and when I try and change wireless AP's. I have no idea whats causing it, Textedit should never be thinking about "how do I input a '5' into this document?" for 30 seconds at a time.

[VSMacOne]

Apple told me about my aluminum macbook beachballing that the OS that comes on the oem hard drive sometimes is corrupted because it is not loaded by a disc but by some computerized method.

Told me to re install Leopard. This shouldn't be happening tho, maybe it is an internet issue?

Great post. First SOLID explanation so far... Let us know if you do a re-install and it fixes it.

[MBHockey]

It may be just the bottleneck of the (relatively) slow hard drives of laptops nowadays. what's in the macbook, a 5400 rpm drive?

Reinstalling is probably your best bet if it's not that though.

[sangosimo]

it shouldn't even be going to the harddrive. we need a new wireless driver that doesn't leak memory

[mlemonds]

resetting the PRAM wouldnt hurt

[RS1999ent]

Apple told me about my aluminum macbook beachballing that the OS that comes on the oem hard drive sometimes is corrupted because it is not loaded by a disc but by some computerized method.

Told me to re install Leopard. This shouldn't be happening tho, maybe it is an internet issue?

Great post. First SOLID explanation so far... Let us know if you do a re-install and it fixes it.

In all honesty, this just seems like a means-justifies-the-end answer. Re-installing the OS might help, but I somehow doubt it's because of corruption caused by the install process used at the factory. I'm sure that the factory install process is automated and does *exactly* the same thing for each type of machine (they probably just copy a master image onto each laptop). So, if there were such a problem, I'd expect every machine made by apple to be privy to it.

Has anyone checked their memory usage and number of page-ins/page-outs? Really, if your laptop has 2gigs of memory, you should almost never be paging to disk unless you're running a VM or something.

To the person who complained about beach balls in Textedit. This just shouldn't happen. I'd suggest downloading the apple developer tools (Xcode) and using the included "Spin Control" app. This app will tell you exactly which process is causing the beach ball and for how long it's locking the CPU. This way, you can tell if it's really textedit that's causing the problem, or some background process.

[Beanlok]

Its the ram 99.9% sure:
http://www.tuaw.com/2008/12/07/aluminum-macbooks-unstable-after-3rd-party-ram-upgrade/

[The Samurai]

Its the ram 99.9% sure:
http://www.tuaw.com/2008/12/07/aluminum-macbooks-unstable-after-3rd-party-ram-upgrade/

I haven't upgraded the RAM, yet im having the wireless issues :D

[angemon89]

I also think it's the RAM/new DDR3 spec that's causing the problems.

[RPatel]

Please, please, please, can someone enlighten me?

I just got a new aluminum macbook (the less expensive one) from work about a month ago. They also bought me a 4GB ram set, which the notebook is recognizing as 4GB, per the "about this mac" section.

However, I get a freaking pinwheel about every hour or so, and I can't figure out why.

I am a heavy system user with Firefox 3, Entourage, Word and often iTunes running at the same time. Now I know firefox is a memory beast, but with 4GB of ram?

Plus, the pinwheel usually occurs while using Firefox, but it will also happen when I'm using other programs, even Word. It's like it just gets constipated over the smallest thing, like clicking on one thing and then another too soon.

The reason I'm so frustrated is that this thing is the cutting-edge laptop with maxed out ram and it is performing worse than my old white macbook 13".

I've seen some of the other complaints about the new alumibooks, but mine is built well (no creeking, noise, loose battery covers, etc.). It's just this stupid pinwheel. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH!

Thanks in advance.

Did anybody ever find a solution? I'm a recent purchaser with this problem and its more than annoying! I'd appreciate suggestions, since the Genius Bar was unable to solve it. Thanks!

[reebzor]

you guys need to learn how computers work. just like someone said, you can have a ton of RAM but thats not going to stop it from filling up. One of the reasons OS X is so great is because it will use all of the ram you have.

[jw2002]

Did you ever getting around to inspecting your Firefox add-ons to see if any of them are memory/resource hogs? Like several here suggested, Flash is a common culprit in causing beach balls. Even javascript can cause beach balls, especially if an infinite loop is encountered. The new v4 Safari has some big improvements in javascript handling, so you might be better off using Safari v4 -- at least for those web sites that are causing beach balls under Firefox.

[RPatel]

After a clean install and updates to Mac software only (and no 3rd-party apps installed) its still doing it just while browsing with Safari. There's no way this requires 4GB of ram. I can just be reading a page and the stupid thing comes up for 20-30 seconds. I'm starting the think the hard drive is bad.

[aznguyen316]

I also have the pinwheel of death often when loading webpages. Using the new Safari 4 beta. I feel like I noticed it after switching but not sure. I also installed a new HDD around the same time, so I'm not sure. I used a system restore that's been around the block lol. I'll prob do a clean install once snow leopard gets released.

[raremage]

I hate firefox, the only time i ever seen a pinwheel on any of my Macs is when using firefox.

This^^^

I use it all the time but FF does from time to time blow up - it's just about the only thing that does for me. I'd switch to Safari or Omniweb but I rely heavily on Gmail and all the offline functions in Google Apps.

[j5045096]

I also think it's the RAM/new DDR3 spec that's causing the problems.

I think there's something to this...I am on a stock 2.4 UMBP and I'll have a few things open (Safari, iTunes, Word etc.) and I get the pinwheel. My last Mac was a 2.16 MacBook with 2gb DDR2 Ram and I expected to be blown away with the performance difference of the MBP and it's faster Ram, processor and FSB. It's faster but i haven't noticed the huge performances increases I thought would come.

I do plan on upgrading the HDD to a SSD when a cheaper 200+ gb is released but all that said, I think there's something to the DDR3 RAM - not sure what, but it's really the biggest change from the last generation of notebooks which didn't seem to have this problem?

[California]

It's the Flash player.

It's happening on my G5 quad with a Quadro 512mb video card and my new 2.4ghz Macbook Aluminum with four gigs of ram.

Apple needs to patch Flash for the Macs... it's rendering our machines obsolete before their time. It is a serious problem, think about it. Four years ago, my PPC machines ran flawlessly with one gig of ram or thereabouts.

Now, faster processors, tons more ram, better video cards and we are beachballing? It is the Adobe Flash problem. Apple needs to do a software update and stop benefitting from the forced Mac sales to us on this fake obselesence.

Oh, and it WILL NOT be acceptable when Snow Leopard comes out for Apple to say -- "we fixed it in SLeopard, we can't be responsible for older machines anymore, it's been three years since the switch to Intel"

because this is obviously a firmware/software/patch issue. Apple needs to realize that we have overcome their former 'hands off our hardware" problem -- I mean I remember physically shaking and perspiring the first time I had to open my Titanium Powerbook to put ram into it -- I was so scared of the Apple warranty and implied 'hands off" dictum that Apple had over their hardware.

This is a FLASH patch problem. I love Apple but resent having to upgrade every three months in hopes of overcoming beachballs.

[j5045096]

It's the Flash player.

It's happening on my G5 quad with a Quadro 512mb video card and my new 2.4ghz Macbook Aluminum with four gigs of ram.

Apple needs to patch Flash for the Macs... it's rendering our machines obsolete before their time. It is a serious problem, think about it. Four years ago, my PPC machines ran flawlessly with one gig of ram or thereabouts.

Now, faster processors, tons more ram, better video cards and we are beachballing? It is the Adobe Flash problem. Apple needs to do a software update and stop benefitting from the forced Mac sales to us on this fake obselesence.

Oh, and it WILL NOT be acceptable when Snow Leopard comes out for Apple to say -- "we fixed it in SLeopard, we can't be responsible for older machines anymore, it's been three years since the switch to Intel"

because this is obviously a firmware/software/patch issue. Apple needs to realize that we have overcome their former 'hands off our hardware" problem -- I mean I remember physically shaking and perspiring the first time I had to open my Titanium Powerbook to put ram into it -- I was so scared of the Apple warranty and implied 'hands off" dictum that Apple had over their hardware.

This is a FLASH patch problem. I love Apple but resent having to upgrade every three months in hopes of overcoming beachballs.

Hmm makes sense. Is it just me or is anybody else like over Flash? I hear all this talk from the iPhone crowd (of which I'm also one) crying out for Apple to put Flash on the iPhone and I'm like NOOOOOO! I don't like it on the computer; I don't want it on my phone--I would much rather see Java used than Flash!

SO, how do you disable Flash on OSX and will doing this affect anything else other than Safari/Internet apps?

[iLunar]

My hunch, it's the RAM.

I just bought a 2.0 Aluminum Macbook with 2GB of RAM. Everything was working fine until I upgraded to 4GB Crucial RAM. Now the computer refuses to wake from sleep (or it does and the screen remains black/off). I've noticed a lot of pinwheels in iTunes and Safari. Didn't notice those problems with 2GB. I tried the 4GB on another computer, works great. Did a memtest, everything checks out peachy.

The new Macbooks do not like RAM upgrades with 3rd party RAM.

[raremage]

Hmm makes sense. Is it just me or is anybody else like over Flash? I hear all this talk from the iPhone crowd (of which I'm also one) crying out for Apple to put Flash on the iPhone and I'm like NOOOOOO! I don't like it on the computer; I don't want it on my phone--I would much rather see Java used than Flash!

SO, how do you disable Flash on OSX and will doing this affect anything else other than Safari/Internet apps?

If it's a Flash problem, wouldn't that fall to Adobe to fix, not Apple...?

[California]

If it's a Flash problem, wouldn't that fall to Adobe to fix, not Apple...?

The only crash reports I have had to send to apple in the last year have to do with Flash. What are they doing with the reports if they can't program a fix?

[RPatel]

I had a Genius appointment earlier today. After about a minute the guy agreed that we could rule out any software issues and just gave me a new system. Thats what it takes to fix this problem.

[dbwie]

I just bought a new Aluminum macbook recently. I upgraded to 4 GB RAM from OWC, and no problems with this third party RAM. I downloaded flash and use it in Safari 4 Beta. I have so far (crossing fingers) not had the spinning beachball issues mentioned here. Because I was upgrading from a PowerPC mac, I was concerned about apps not running correctly if I moved them over from my old Mac using migration assistant. I only migrated my user account and files, and installed my main apps from scratch. I think this may have limited any software problems I might have had.

[chstr]

how much free space is left on your hard drive?

[Cooki3]

Just wanted to chime in here and say that I see a very similar problem with my early-2008 macbook pro. I get the pinwheel of death when using the wireless connection for an extended period of time. I don't run firefox however; usually, I only have Safari, and several ssh connections open when the problem occurs. Unfortunately, I was never able to find a fix, so I've resorted to turning off airport and using a wired connection whenever I know I'm going to use the laptop for a while.

I did get as far as tracing my problem to the Yukon wireless driver. It seems like this driver, for whatever reason, eventually craps out, thus causing the system to crash. Check out my previous post here:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=577905

The system.log entry tells me that the problem might be due to a memory leak in the wireless driver, but I don't see any symptoms that would lead me to suspect this as the root cause. That is, the pinwheel of death is not preceded by a period of unresponsiveness or excessive paging.

Do any of you see something similar?

I'm having this issue too, but only when downloading (no matter what torrent client I'm using). Sooner or later the pinwheel appears and everything freezes when trying to open/close any program. The only solution is the power button. And yes, this is happening on a wireless connection, and I believe it is the network driver that is causing the crashes. It is very annoying. I have to use my old computer to download, since it's almost impossible to get my downloads done when I have to reboot the ****ing computer 10 times.

It doesn't always happens, and it happens more often when downloading more than one torrent. I think both downloading speed and number of connections is the most important factors. And for some reason, the system very likely crashes serveral times if it crashes a first time.

[heatmiser]

My last Mac was a 2.16 MacBook with 2gb DDR2 Ram and I expected to be blown away with the performance difference of the MBP and it's faster Ram, processor and FSB. It's faster but i haven't noticed the huge performances increases I thought would come.


Apple marketing aside, there aren't any huge performance increases to be had. The most significant in recent years was the PPC to Intel switch. Since then, everything's been incremental. I have a 2.16 MB with 2gb of ram, and I'm not "upgrading" until quad cores are standard. It's much simpler this way.

[mfgheel]

For what it's worth, I had this problem until I stopped using Safari entirely. Now that I use Firefox exclusively, I almost never get any beachballing. Not sure what about Safari was causing the problem, but I'll wait for an update to try using it again.

[chstr]

For what it's worth, I had this problem until I stopped using Safari entirely. Now that I use Firefox exclusively, I almost never get any beachballing. Not sure what about Safari was causing the problem, but I'll wait for an update to try using it again.

This browser war has been going on for ever and nobody seems to win because they are both great browsers for different reasons. I have them both open and have very little problems with my early 08 2.5 mbp.