Spinning Beachball

06Honda said:

I have been getting this lately when surfing normally used web sites. I use a MacBook Pro 13' Laptop
Version 10.6.8
Processor 2.3 GHz Core i5
Memory 4 GB 1333 MHz DDR3

Any things I can do in an attempt to sort this out. Thanks for any help.

Paul

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The enemy of the beachball is RAM and hard drive space. If your Macintosh HD is filling up, carefully delete some stuff you no longer need like downloads of older versions of OpenOffice which weigh in at 100+ meg each.

A 13 in MBP is very easy to upgrade the RAM (and HDD) if you want to. Go to Crucial.com and run their memory scanner. It will identify your Mac and take you to a web page to sell you the most (recommended) RAM.

Another issue that can be causing beachballs is a "tired" install of OSX. Installing Snow Leopard over again, without wiping anything, then letting the upgrade run could resolve issues as well.

As a last resort, people have said a wipe and install does wonders. I've rarely done this but even a wipe and install has 2 levels of difficulty. If you have a FRESH Time Machine backup, you can "migrate" from it. This is the easier path. Another option is to manually copy all your stuff over and reinstall all your apps. This is the "cleanest" option but is also the most work. I used to have to do this on Windows all the time. I've not done this since switching to OSX almost 7 years ago.

06Honda said:

I have been getting this lately when surfing normally used web sites

Click to expand...

There are many possible causes of beachballing. It could be a lack of RAM or a CPU-intensive process or a failing hard drive or an app that is hung up. When surfing, a common culprit is Flash. Flash is notorious for consuming system resources, raising temps and decreasing battery life. For Flash-related issues:

• Find your Flash version and make sure it's the latest version available. Never install or update Flash from a pop-up on a website. Always go to Adobe's site to get Flash or updates.
• Install ClickToFlash (Safari), Flashblock (Firefox) or FlashBlock (Chrome) to control which Flash content plays on websites.
• Try using the YouTube HTML5 Video Player to watch YouTube videos, when available. (May impact fullscreen viewing. See link for details.) Some have reported better performance with HTML5, while some have reported worse. Try it and find out what works best for you.

Follow every step of the following instructions precisely. Do not skip any steps.

1. Launch Activity Monitor
2. Change "My Processes" at the top to "All Processes"
3. Click on the "% CPU" column heading once or twice, so the arrow points downward (highest values on top).
   (If that column isn't visible, right-click on the column headings and check it, NOT "CPU Time")
4. Click on the System Memory tab at the bottom.
5. Take a screen shot of the entire Activity Monitor window, then scroll down to see the rest of the list, take another screen shot
6. Post your screenshots.

06Honda said:

Here are the two screen shots.

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There is nothing in your screen shots to indicate any source of beachballing. There is no significant demand on CPU/GPU or RAM.

Spinning Beachball of Death!

Do you have any other ideas what could be causing the freezing? After using my IMAC for over 30 minutes..the spinning begins. I appreciate any thoughts you might have. Thanks, KLuce6

kluce6 said:

Do you have any other ideas what could be causing the freezing? After using my IMAC for over 30 minutes..the spinning begins. I appreciate any thoughts you might have. Thanks, KLuce6

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Post screen shots using the instructions I posted earlier.