Noob with a "pinwheel of death" question

[HaiirPeace]

Hey everyone! So I've had a PC my entire life and was convinced by my friends to buy a Macbook since my Dell Studio was crapping out after 2.5 years. (which btw I paid $850 for and only sold for $275). ANYWAY So I bought my mac in May of this year and ever since the day I bought it I've been getting the pinwheel of death every once in a while and I'm not sure if I click things too fast? I'm impatient with the internet sometimes. I bought my Macbook new and not used I got it on sale from Frys Electronics for $800

 

[MacVibe]

From what I understand, the pinwheel is a hard disk access issue (unless something is truly hanging), so yes, you may be clicking too fast. Run Disc Utility and repair permissions and verify disk, if everything looks okay, then you just have to live with the pinwheel. The answer to this is a faster hard drive, perhaps a 500 gig 7200 rpm, or a SSD.

 

[HaiirPeace]

well the pinwheel usually is only up for a couple seconds when it does happen. I was just wondering if it were normal because a friend told me that a new mac shouldn't do that

 

[eman]

The pin wheel can be normal from time to time, but certainly not a pin wheel of death (never ending pin wheel). I've seen the pin wheel mostly on the older macs with 512 MHz of memory and after adding more memory, the pin wheel goes away for the most part.

 

[Jason Beck]

Mow some lawns and pop an x25 SSD in that baby and UNLEASH the Dragon! Seriously though. Or get a 7200 rpm hard drive. Watch what the lowly Macbook can do.

 

[alust2013]

If it only pops up for a couple seconds, then no worries, it will do that if it is looking for something on the hard drive of loading a big file, etc. If it stays for a while, then you might have a problem.