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10.6.2 - Eternal Beachball of Doom

T

Thunder82

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jul 16, 2008
442
3
Chicago, IL
I'm not sure if it's just me (and the several people I know with macs) but 10.6.2 seems to be a bit of a disaster. I have a 17" unibody MBP and have been loving it until I upgraded to 10.6.2. Now I get beachballs everywhere, mostly in Safari and Excel, but all over the place really. Certainly never had any problems like this in 10.6 and 10.6.1. Is anyone else experiencing anything like this?

My co-worker has the exact same model MBP and is experiencing the same thing, so I'm not sure if this is specific to our exact model of MBP.
 
Thunder82 said:
I'm not sure if it's just me (and the several people I know with macs) but 10.6.2 seems to be a bit of a disaster. I have a 17" unibody MBP and have been loving it until I upgraded to 10.6.2. Now I get beachballs everywhere, mostly in Safari and Excel, but all over the place really. Certainly never had any problems like this in 10.6 and 10.6.1. Is anyone else experiencing anything like this?

My co-worker has the exact same model MBP and is experiencing the same thing, so I'm not sure if this is specific to our exact model of MBP.
Click to expand...

I get them once in a while.. not really in my browser. Mostly in Microsoft Office once in a great while. For the most part 10.6.2 has been good to me. Weird. I am on a 13" MBP..
 
No problems with 10.6.2 on MacBook 2.13Ghz.

Did you do a clean install of Snow Leopard or an upgrade. Because my upgrade ended in nothing but disaster, and the EBOD. (lol)

Clean install and everything is perfect. :) Or at least it is on my Mac.
 
How old is your MBP? Mine is just over a year and I'm running 10.6.2 with the same problems. I'm curious about these issues because I seem to have problems that other people don't and also seem to not have the same problems other people are reporting.:confused:
 
You can use Activity Monitor to "sample" a program that's spinning. If you post the resulting sample log here I can probably interpret it and figure out at least something about what's causing it.
 
Just saw the machine you're talking about at a Mac store with 10.6.2 & there was no problem. I don't have this problem & also have lots of friends with Macs who have no problem. Maybe it's caused by a haxie or some questionable software you installed...
 
macrem said:
Maybe it's caused by a haxie or some questionable software you installed...
Click to expand...

I've been wondering the same, although I don't run anything too strange - and certainly haven't changed much since 10.6 or 10.6.1. (which ran fine)

I'm running a 17" Unibody MBP 2.66Ghz with an Intel Gen2 SSD. At first I thought the SSD might be the culprit, although my buddy has a WD 500GB blue and has the same problems.

I'll try catching the beachballs in activity monitor. The only real problem is that the beachballs don't last real long, they just happen SUPER often.
 
Thunder82 said:
I've been wondering the same, although I don't run anything too strange - and certainly haven't changed much since 10.6 or 10.6.1. (which ran fine)

I'm running a 17" Unibody MBP 2.66Ghz with an Intel Gen2 SSD. At first I thought the SSD might be the culprit, although my buddy has a WD 500GB blue and has the same problems.

I'll try catching the beachballs in activity monitor. The only real problem is that the beachballs don't last real long, they just happen SUPER often.
Click to expand...

OKay question. What and how many programs do you have running when
you get them? If you have a few programs open that are memory intensive,
or even may have memory holes in them then that could be your problem.
My MBP has 2 gigs of ram, and I can run my browser with a few tabs, finder of course, entourage, itunes etc and not notice any slowdown. What have
you got running?
 
Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac messed up my Leopard install..... it may be that. Thankfully I bought iWork with Snow Leopard.
 
I wish iWork was a real option for me, unfortunately excel is the only option for the work I do.

I have 8GB of memory. (PC3-8500 from OWC/Macsales - believe it is Micron memory) I don't believe this is my problem. My friends machine has the stock 4GB from Apple and has the same issues.

The only other culprit I can think of is the new Parallels 5. The beachball really gets its use when this is running in the background. (I run in coherence/crystal most often) Is anyone else running parallels 5 and noticing any slow-downs?
 
10.6.2 has been silky smooth on my late 2009 MBP. I primarily use Firefox and haven't seen the beach ball since I updated to 10.6.2.
 
Thunder82 said:
I wish iWork was a real option for me, unfortunately excel is the only option for the work I do.
Click to expand...

you can save as excel format in iwork if that helps.... or do you do some seriously heavy spreadsheets with functions iwork doesn't support? i don't know... ive always presumed what office can do, iwork can do but better....
 
i'm just curious which Excel function is needed that Numbers (or OpenOffice Calc) cannot handle.
 
I got a long beachball than this. Many times...

screenshot20091125at222.png
 
Angelo95210 said:
I got a long beachball than this. Many times...

screenshot20091125at222.png
Click to expand...
Did you file a bug report with Apple specifically blaming the developer's who worked on 10.6.2 for this, obviously, OS X (not a sketchy Flash file nor Firefox) issue? :rolleyes:
 
t0mat0 said:
Install ClicktoFlash. DOn't get Flash running unnecessarily. Had the problem too.
Click to expand...
I would like to see if I can be reproduce your issue on Safari without any Flash tweak. Could either of you please provide a link to a legit website that causes this behavior?
 
Thunder82 said:
I wish iWork was a real option for me, unfortunately excel is the only option for the work I do.

I have 8GB of memory. (PC3-8500 from OWC/Macsales - believe it is Micron memory) I don't believe this is my problem. My friends machine has the stock 4GB from Apple and has the same issues.

The only other culprit I can think of is the new Parallels 5. The beachball really gets its use when this is running in the background. (I run in coherence/crystal most often) Is anyone else running parallels 5 and noticing any slow-downs?
Click to expand...

Try VMware Fusion, it is significantly faster.
 
I also had looooots of beach balls, from 10.6 on.

Then there was 10.6.1 and nothing did change, until there was a fix to solve issues concerning some models and hard drives.
That did the trick, but not for long.

A week or so later 10.6.2 came out and everything got fudged up again, and at an even higher rate than before.

I brought my unibody 17" 2.66 Ghz to the shop so they could fix the issue. But no luck either, they've been thoroughly testing the machine for almost a week, but they found squad.

So I've decided to format again (I've formatted like 5 times to reinstall SL in order to get a good install?) and now I'm on Leopard again and everything's just working fine.

The only issue I'm still having is when I'm on my legally bought W7 Professional it suddenly freezes and the only option is to kill the machine's power.
And I get the issue every time (only on W7 while Leopard in installed, and on both W7 and SL when SL was installed).

I already have bought a new HDD but I still have the same issues.

My guess is it might be an issue with the S-ATA connector or motherboard?

A little help here please?
 
I get the beachballs too frequently. Unfortunately I cant pinpoint whether its 10.6.2 or MS Office 2008 that caused it. I am leaning towards Office because I noticed it after installing it and its update.

I have iWork so I use that mostly but one of my college classes required office :/

I'm doing a fresh install once my backups finish in a few days since my mac install has been going since 2008.
 
chrono1081 said:
I get the beachballs too frequently. Unfortunately I cant pinpoint whether its 10.6.2 or MS Office 2008 that caused it. I am leaning towards Office because I noticed it after installing it and its update.

I have iWork so I use that mostly but one of my college classes required office :/

I'm doing a fresh install once my backups finish in a few days since my mac install has been going since 2008.
Click to expand...

My issues aren't related to MS Office, of that I'm sure.
 
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