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heycal

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jul 25, 2013
873
28
So I've got a Mac Air 2013 11" model. For awhile now, I've noticed when typing that things freeze up a bit, or more accurately, freeze for several seconds, then produce the letters I typed. This seems to happen most often in yahoo when writing emails, but then, that is what I usually do the most so perhaps I notice it there the most. Often while doing that, or visiting websites, the beachball will appear, and I have to wait and wait.

This happens more often in Safari than Chrome I believe. I had thought it might be do to me using a a very old OS, like 10.8 or whatever came with it, but I finally updated to High Sierra today and the problem is still happening.

What might cause this, and how can I fix?

Bonus points for also telling me how I can make the address bar longer/wider, and the back button bigger in High Sierra. My old eyes preferred the much bigger back button I somehow had with the older OS.

Thanks!
 
Best I can tell, or guess, the 'frozen' key issue would not be related to the internet connection, right?
 
Is there no Mac wizard who can explain the sluggish keyboard issue I sometimes I have?
 
It's mid 2013 Mac Air, High Sierra 10.13.3. This is what I see in the activity monitor. I don't know much about computers, so some of the language you guys use above is lost on this old man unfortunately. But the beach ball issue is getting worse.
Screen Shot 2018-03-24 at 12.18.27 PM.png
 
Is there no Mac wizard who can explain the sluggish keyboard issue I sometimes I have?

What are the specs on your 11" MBA?

if your MBA is an i5 1.3 GHZ 4GB RAM 128GB SSD then most likely you might have many application programs running in the background taking up valuable memory resources. Since the GPU uses shared memory (1.5GB of it) you're only left with 2.5GB for the OS and any application software. My guess is that there is not enough memory for the computer to do everything and it is forced to use the SDD to store some of the page memory as swap files which is probably the cause of the delay you're experiencing but that's just a hunch...

My MBA is a 2015 2.2 i7 8GB 512GB NVMe. I figure I have about 6.5GB available for OS and application files and as you see in the picture below:

40991388251_fa33a765c8_b.jpg


I'm using up 6.15GB. I don't have any beach balling cursor but I would guess once I start opening up more pages and/or application or utility programs I too will start experiencing the beach ball cursor until I free up some space...
 
Last edited:
It's a 13" mid-2013, and it says 1.3 GHz Intel Core i5. Is that enough information about the computer to tell if it's a storage issue? I can dig up other info. if I know what and where to look for it.
 
As I posted above what I explained is just a hunch... I'm sure there are others much more familiar who can explain in much more detail than I have...
 
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