New 21 base- keeps on spinning

[noobinator]

I got my base 21 on friday. I originally installed bootcamp but then found i liked parallels better. So i still have bootcamp but run parallels to get into windows. I have two users set up, my wife and i. Besides that i only installed office, skype ang log me in. Oh and i have time machine backed up to a time capsule. I leave parallels windows suspended when not in use.

So now the potential issue. 4 times since friday i've had the spinning beachball get stuck. All 4 times i had to hard power off the imac. I let it spin about 10 minutes each time. 3 times i was just doing mundane tasks like switching programs or messing with settings. One other time i was bring up parallels.

Is this cause for concern? 4 times in 1 week? My 2009 macbook pro has hung this bad once in over 3 years.

 

[sam3020]

This sounds really odd. I have had my base model 21.5 inch since December and mine has not locked up on me once. Either you have a dodgy hard drive or you may need to reinstall your OS

 

[noobinator]

This sounds really odd. I have had my base model 21.5 inch since December and mine has not locked up on me once. Either you have a dodgy hard drive or you may need to reinstall your OS

I am hoping it's not the HDD but I'll keep an eye on it.

 

[trustever]

I would run a check on the RAM, when the damn beach ball appears to often is due scarce available RAM.

IF you were not doing RAM intensive tasks it could be possible that one of your RAM tablet is faulty so the computer has half of the available. Hopefuly I am wrong..

 

[noobinator]

I would run a check on the RAM, when the damn beach ball appears to often is due scarce available RAM.

IF you were not doing RAM intensive tasks it could be possible that one of your RAM tablet is faulty so the computer has half of the available. Hopefuly I am wrong..

It is showing as 8gb RAM available but you are right, this does sound more like RAM than an HDD issue.

 

[trustever]

There are some tests you can do on the RAM but I can't remember what you need, try using google and search test RAM or similar and see what you get.

Good luck

 

[noobinator]

Alright I think something is definitely wrong. Tonight I played around on safari, went into windows through parallels and thats about it. It was very laggy all night. When I opened programs the icon at the bottom would bounce about 15 times. My 2009 mbp does maybe 2 bounces. Then i would click on things, nothing would happen for like 30 seconds then all my actions i was clicking would happen at once. It seems like the ram is hanging or freezing. Or is it just slow because of my parallels? It did also freeze with the beachball again to the point i had to hard power off. What do you think?

 

[Gogol]

Show us your Virtual Memory use with Activity Monitor. Do you have Page-outs?

 

[noobinator]

Show us your Virtual Memory use with Activity Monitor. Do you have Page-outs?

I'll screenshot my activity monitor when I get home after work today. What are page-outs? Is this something that will show in activity monitor?

 

[noobinator]

During parallels:
Page in: 372.4mb
Page out: 7.6mb

Parallels suspended (and running painfully slow):
Page in: 788.9mb
Page out: 217.2mb

So you can see it is when parallels is suspended that I'm having issues.
What can I do?

 

[Gogol]

You can add more memory or let parallels use less.

 

[Serban]

Or forget about parallels and use boot camp

 

[noobinator]

So really the base 21" imac is not strong enough to run parallels and be smooth?

My 2009 MBP does a better job and it has 4gb ram and 2 core cpu and crappy graphics processor.

And why does it run fine while using parallels but not so good when I suspend it?

 

[Gogol]

So really the base 21" imac is not strong enough to run parallels and be smooth?

My 2009 MBP does a better job and it has 4gb ram and 2 core cpu and crappy graphics processor.

And why does it run fine while using parallels but not so good when I suspend it?

Are you using exactly the same settings on both computers for the virtual machine?
Try to give the VM less RAM in the settings and see what happens. Just for testing. When the VM is suspended it can need more RAM for this action and thus needs more virtual memory (=page outs). When the blocks that are paged to disk are needed again your Mac will be slow and show a beach ball..

 

[hummer28]

I am hoping it's not the HDD but I'll keep an eye on it.

My new 27-inch iMac continues to freeze on me as well. I have had to power it off at least 5-7 times now and haven't owned it a week. I have a genius appointment scheduled in a couple of hours. I'm wondering if it isn't the aftermarket RAM I placed in it at this point.