MBP beach balls a lot?

[cambookpro]

Hi,
I have a late 2008 MBP. C2D, 2GB RAM and 500GB HD. I'm not a power user but I will do the occasional Photoshopping and sometimes do some FCP video editing. I admit FCP is quite a lot for that machine, but it seems to beach ball quite a lot, especially when only running Safari, iTunes and Mail. iLife '11 (especially iPhoto and iMovie) also almost ground it to a halt. What could it do with? I'm thinking 4GBs RAM should free it up a bit.

 

[DVD9]

Hi,
I have a late 2008 MBP. C2D, 2GB RAM and 500GB HD. I'm not a power user but I will do the occasional Photoshopping and sometimes do some FCP video editing. I admit FCP is quite a lot for that machine, but it seems to beach ball quite a lot, especially when only running Safari, iTunes and Mail. iLife '11 (especially iPhoto and iMovie) also almost ground it to a halt. What could it do with? I'm thinking 4GBs RAM should free it up a bit.

The Beach Ball of Death!

At least it was on my hackintosh yesterday. Not even a forcequit would close Safari.
--

 

[yellowmuffins]

Yup, it sounds like those beach balls are from you only having 2GB of ram. In my experience, 2GB of ram isn't really enough to smoothly running snow leopard. Safari could easily be using 500mb of Ram, iTunes 250mb, Mail 100mb, and iLife apps 400+mb. That's over a gig right there not counting other running apps and the system.

It's probably not your case but I've also noticed hard drives can be the source of beach balls...if you have a bad or failing drive it can give you alot of beach balls. I'd say start with a Ram upgrade first.

 

[zeemeerman2]

Yup, it sounds like those beach balls are from you only having 2GB of ram. In my experience, 2GB of ram isn't really enough to smoothly running snow leopard. Safari could easily be using 500mb of Ram, iTunes 250mb, Mail 100mb, and iLife apps 400+mb. That's over a gig right there not counting other running apps and the system.

It's probably not your case but I've also noticed hard drives can be the source of beach balls...if you have a bad or failing drive it can give you alot of beach balls. I'd say start with a Ram upgrade first.

If you don't know whether if it's the hard drive or not, run an Apple hardware check thingy (forgot the name, sorry..) which can be found on any of your Mac OS X Installation DVD's. Do that before buying anything.

 

[cambookpro]

If you don't know whether if it's the hard drive or not, run an Apple hardware check thingy (forgot the name, sorry..) which can be found on any of your Mac OS X Installation DVD's. Do that before buying anything.

I don't think it's the hard drive personally, i've been looking at iStat and my RAM just doesn't seem to be enough. I think Ill get 4GB when Lion comes out.

 

[AnodizedFish]

MBA 11-inch with 2GB of RAM doesn't get beach balls
So I suppose the fast SSD on it helps prevent that.

 

[netdog]

I'm having the same on a Late 2009 17" MBP with 4GB of RAM and a drive that checks out fine.

 

[cambookpro]

MBA 11-inch with 2GB of RAM doesn't get beach balls
So I suppose the fast SSD on it helps prevent that.

Do you run FCP on it though?

 

[aimbdd]

Definitely ram.. 2 gigs is no where near enough for what you do i have 6 gb on my late 2008 and its amazing... i can actually listen to music while leaving aperture open now haha.

 

[BornToMac]

More Ram always helps. It might help to know that I had an early 08 MBP that was having similar problems. Turns out it was due to the nvidia GPU failure thing and they replaced my machine at no charge. The new machine came with 4g of ram and a quad core. Maybe you should have a genius look at it...

Good luck!

 

[iPhone1]

I've had the beach ball of death only happen once on my MBP with an i7, 8GB of RAM and an SSD. I think Chrome caused the error. Could not replicate the issue. Sometimes computers just have a mind of their own.

 

[mac8867]

OP, I see you have a time capsule... This is going somewhere. A couple months back, i was "beach balling" and I happened to notice after several days of frustration, that it always happened when a tine machine backup was running... Actually, trying to run. I reset the storage on my time capsule server, and started from a fresh new backup and all was fine. Haven't had the problem since.