I have a Mac G4 laptop. The other night I was on the web and everything was working fine. I then left for dinner and had lost the web connection. But, ever since then, the Mac takes forever to do anything. It takes 5-6 minutes on startup to get to the desktop. Likewise for any activity I try to do. This color wheel justs spins & spins & spins. Troubleshoot the spinning beach ball. Gregory Swain runs The X Lab, a site dedicated to troubleshooting Mac OS X. He also writes and publishes the Troubleshooting Mac OS X e-book series.
What program are you in. Often it means you need to clear cache and cookies. Yahoo has been weird of late as has the new Firefox upgrades. When this happens (and I just added more ram by 4x) I get out and reboot the program. If bombarded with third party cookies Firefox will bomb. Since upgrading the Firefox my mail has gotten slow.
I'll click on it and get the spinner.then a pop-up that says a script is running. I click it off and all returns to normal.
With upgrading the ram things like iPhoto that once took a moment or two now jump to life with no wait. Ah, the 'Spinning Pizza Wheel of Death'. It's kinda like the hourglass that Windows gives you. When an application is really busy, you'll get that cursor. Usually it's just a single program that's got an issue (I see it mostly in Safari when I have six or seven tabs open and some of them have Flash animations or something trying to play). More RAM might help but it might also be a weird Unix file permissions error, depending on the program. You can go into Disk Utility, select your startup disk and tell it to Repair Permissions.
That will often fix problems like that, if they can be fixed easily. Other times, it's just that you're overloading the program in question (like when I have too many tabs open in Safari). In that case, you might have to just reduce the demands on that program. For instance, if you get that icon when you're opening iPhoto, you might want to sort your pics into more directories or something so it doesn't have to generate so many previews all at the same time.
I always keep the 'Force Quit' window open and slide it nearly off the screen so I have easy access to it. Sometimes the spinning wheel won't let me access 'Force Quit' from the Apple Menu, and even the keyboard command for it gets hung up. But with the 'Force Quit' window open, I can easily force quit the non-responsive application, which is usually one of the web browsers.
With Foxfire, restarting gives the option of reopening tabs/windows from a previous session. Safari does not, but I have to force quit both of them fairly often, and it can be very frustrating which I why I developed this trick as it always works and saves me a lot of time. KoaBoa wrote: I always keep the 'Force Quit' window open and slide it nearly off the screen so I have easy access to it. Sometimes the spinning wheel won't let me access 'Force Quit' from the Apple Menu, and even the keyboard command for it gets hung up. But with the 'Force Quit' window open, I can easily force quit the non-responsive application, which is usually one of the web browsers. With Foxfire, restarting gives the option of reopening tabs/windows from a previous session. Safari does not, but I have to force quit both of them fairly often, and it can be very frustrating which I why I developed this trick as it always works and saves me a lot of time.
Sorry if this has been stated and I missed it, but you can also open a force quit window by pressing: 'command - option - esc'; this has never failed to open the force-quit window for me. Aehoffma wrote: I never understood by there isn't an easy defragmentation utility on the MAC. That often helps a PC. So does tuening of crap that's running in the background.
![Mac Mac](/uploads/1/2/5/6/125637363/683309482.jpg)
That's because the HSF+ filesystem on the Mac isn't nearly as affected by file fragmentation as the FAT16/FAT32/NTFS file systems on PCs. What you DO get on a Mac are problems with Unix file permissions, whether caused by random disk errors or because some program monkeys around with them and messes one up because of sloppy programming. The OS X Disk Utility program has an option called Repair Permissions that will fix nearly all of these particular problems. Other things that OS X needs are generally run as background cron jobs at certain times of day - flushing network caches, archiving and deleting system logs, and temp files, etc. You can manually run them by opening up a Terminal window and typing 'sudo period daily' (without the quote marks) and entering your admin password when prompted.
![Ntfs Ntfs](/uploads/1/2/5/6/125637363/413410857.png)
That runs the daily maintenance tasks. Use 'sudo periodic weekly' to do the weekly maintenance tasks, and 'sudo periodic monthly' to do the monthly tasks.