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a little help with my new iMac

V

vanline

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 28, 2009
13
0
27-inch, Mid 2011 refurb
processor 2.7 GHZ Intel Core i5
memory 4 GB 1333 MHz DDR3
Graphics AMD Radeon HD 6770M 512 MB
Software lion 10.7.2

My issue is i am getting constant spinning beach ball when I am just surfing the internet. Initially I thought it was foxfire so i switched back to Safari but i am stilling getting it and messages that the webpages didn't load.

Any suggestions to help a non-technical person figure out what the issue is.

Thanks,
Neil
 
Not sure if it is related, but I had a problem in the past with my Javascript in Safari and it behaved the same way on certain sites. Though I think Firefox worked.

Maybe try disabling it and other plug-ins as well in the Security Tab in preferences?

All updates installed?
 
Be careful...

I had the same problem just before my hard drive died in my i7 iMac.

Try doing a disk utility run and perform a disk repair. If it fails to repair (text in red indicating problems) you might have a problematic drive.
 
I've also had a lot less problems when I switched to Chrome. Something's going on with Safari; it might be software bloat, or poor programming, but I don't nearly get the spinning beach ball as much after I started using Chrome.
 
Agree with everyone, I love Apple but have always thought poorly of safari. It kept hanging when trying to load pages and just wasn't cutting it.

Have been using Chrome for quite some time and can say I am extremely pleased.
 
Yeah safari is definitely a hog. I regular kill the app to free tons of ram. I have chrome as well but don't use it very much. Maybe I should spend some time getting used to it,
 
There are many possible causes of the spinning beach ball of death (SBBOD) some are software related and some hardware however the hardware is more rare. One of the most common issues is not enough RAM, you may think 4GB of RAM is a lot but by todays standards it's not particularly especially if you browse the web. Browsers tend to be RAM hogs especially if you have a many tabs running. An easy method to tell if your system is starved for RAM is to keep Activity Monitor (Application - Utilities - Activity Monitor) open and when you see the SBBOD to navigate to it and click the System Memory tab. As a general rule of thumb if you system is showing 500MB or less of FREE RAM then it would benefit from a RAM upgrade. While you are in AM look in the %CPU column and see if anything is using a large percentage of the CPU, this could be your issue too.

Finally I would recommend reading the XLabs SBBOD article located at:

http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/sbbod.html
 
Are you sure there are no other programs running?
On my 2009 iMac, Safari works like a charm. A spinning beach ball is very very rare. Maybe it runs better because I have 8GB RAM?
 
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