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New to mac. Hanging apps

M

moorzee

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 27, 2010
7
0
Howdo folks

Bought an iMac the other day. Been a PC man since back in the day. The mac looks the bollox and I am slowly getting used to having one mouse button. My issue is apps that hang.

I imported my photos from external HD(which needs formatting for mac) into iPhoto and this hung every time I opened it, cursor was a circle with spectrum colours spinning around.

Copied photos onto machine and iPhoto ran more smoothly. However, I'm slightly concerned at the amount of times I've had to click "force quit" in the first week of mac ownership. Is this a regular "feature" in ownership of one of these? I never had to "end task" this much in my sweaty ancient PC that was on it's arse!

Cheers
 
moorzee said:
this hung every time I opened it, cursor was a circle with spectrum colours spinning around.
Click to expand...
That's known as the "spinning beachball".

I'm slightly concerned at the amount of times I've had to click "force quit" in the first week of mac ownership. Is this a regular "feature" in ownership of one of these?
Click to expand...
No, it should not be. I rarely have to force quit, and when I do, it's a Microsoft application! There's something wrong. How much RAM do you have?
 
I have had to "Force Quit" maybe 5 times in the year and a half I have owned my computer. Something is definitely not right. Is it one application in particular or what? Give us more details of what all you are doing at the time, how many applications you have open, which applications they are, etc.
 
If your having slowdowns with iPhoto, it could be because it is going through all of your pictures and finding "Faces" and "Places" information. This should be finished fairly quickly unless you have GBs and GBs of photos. If it's happening in all apps then that's a different problem...
 
Thanks for the replies.

It has happened a couple of times on different apps, iTunes for instance, the icon just sat there bouncing in the dock at the bottom of the monitor and never shown the application screen. I photo did the same again earlier on this evening as I described earlier, the beachball thing for approx 3 mins so I forced quit.

I've had the machine a week so shouldn't be giving me jip already surely????????
 
If it's new and under warranty, take it back to the Apple store and have them check it out.

What programs have you installed since you got it?
 
moorzee said:
Thanks for the replies.

It has happened a couple of times on different apps, iTunes for instance, the icon just sat there bouncing in the dock at the bottom of the monitor and never shown the application screen. I photo did the same again earlier on this evening as I described earlier, the beachball thing for approx 3 mins so I forced quit.

I've had the machine a week so shouldn't be giving me jip already surely????????
Click to expand...

How many photos are we talking about here? 10's, 100's, 1000's? The more you have the longer it will take. Same thing with the external drive, that may slow things down as well. It does sounds like maybe the internal hard drive isn't quite right because it shouldn't hang that long.
 
CylonGlitch said:
How many photos are we talking about here? 10's, 100's, 1000's? The more you have the longer it will take. Same thing with the external drive, that may slow things down as well. It does sounds like maybe the internal hard drive isn't quite right because it shouldn't hang that long.
Click to expand...

A couple of thousand, all on the internal HD now as I pulled them off the external because I reckoned that may have been a contributing factor.
 
moorzee said:
A couple of thousand, all on the internal HD now as I pulled them off the external because I reckoned that may have been a contributing factor.
Click to expand...

And that would explain it. The "Faces" feature always caused a lot of problems for me when I was importing a bunch of pictures. Also, make sure you are importing pictures only. I accidently had a few small videos and rather than getting an error message, iPhoto just hung up on me.
 
Hiya again

Just bought iWork 08 and am unable to open Numbers08 templates. App crashes when try to open template. Is this my mac or what do you think?

Ta.
 
Did you get the computer from a mail-order catalog? Did they give you free RAM with it, too?

I've been out of the tech support business for a few years, but my experience as a bench tech was that the "free" RAM they give you is "insanely cheap RAM," which in turn means "unreliable RAM." My experience with bad RAM was that it was the free RAM that people got from these companies--very rarely Apple RAM or other third-party RAM the people installed themselves.

Bad RAM can easily cause application crashes like this. You should get this checked out, as it can also corrupt data on your hard drive as it's going through the RAM.
 
With regards to iWork '08, before you try using it make sure that you run software updates to take Keynote, Numbers, and Pages to their most recent revisions. You really should have bought iWork '09, its $79, instead of '08. Maybe you can get a refund and buy the newer iWork suite?
 
JediMeister said:
With regards to iWork '08, before you try using it make sure that you run software updates to take Keynote, Numbers, and Pages to their most recent revisions. You really should have bought iWork '09, its $79, instead of '08. Maybe you can get a refund and buy the newer iWork suite?
Click to expand...

If you search the web you can find iWork '09 for around $45. Just make sure you get the full retail version. :D
 
The "software update" option on the apple logo in top left of menu bar sorted the problem. I bought 08 as it was only £40 as opposed to £80. Only for kids to do homework so shouldn't be that much of an issue.

The software states it is office compatible, how true is this as the kids school are PC?

Thanks for the help.
 
So you are saying updating the software fixed it.

By the way, there are more than 1 mouse buttons. Ever heard of multi touch?
 
moorzee said:
The software states it is office compatible, how true is this as the kids school are PC?
Click to expand...

You should be able to open files from the Windows version of Word, Excel, etc. with no problem (well, unless they are .docx and .xlsx format, then you need the converter installed)

From iWorks apps, select SaveAs and pick a Word/Excel format. Those files should open in the Windows versions.
 
Gregg2 said:
You should be able to open files from the Windows version of Word, Excel, etc. with no problem (well, unless they are .docx and .xlsx format, then you need the converter installed)

From iWorks apps, select SaveAs and pick a Word/Excel format. Those files should open in the Windows versions.
Click to expand...

Actually you want to choose the Export option from the File menu, rather than the Save As... selection. Save As... in Pages/Numbers/Keynote '08 just allows you to change where the file will be saved or whether it will be saved as an '06 or '05-compatible file.
 
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