Spinning beach ball (again)

I've been having a lot of "nonspecific" problems with my Mac Pro. They seem to happen more frequently after I've woken the computer from sleep. As far as I can tell, they are not application related. I get a spinning beach ball that persists for several moments, and then stops. Occasionally the entire system freezes and I have to hold the power button on the front of the computer to get it to shut down.
A few days ago one of my hard drives failed. I thought that may have been the cause of the problems, but I've replaced the drive and I'm still experiencing the issues.
I've booted from the Apple Install DVD and repaired all of my internal disks and repaired permissions several times. I've also run DiskWarrior 4.1 from an external disk. None of this has helped.
Is there anything else I can do short of a total reinstall?

I'm not sure what would constitute suspicious behavior in Activity Monitor? What should I be looking for?
No, I don't have Little Snitch installed.
It really does seem like the problems start after waking from sleep. Perhaps I should just avoid sleeping the computer. I had the "reboot on wake" problem so many others did, and that was fixed by the firmware update, but in all my years using Macs it seems like sleep has been a major source of problems.
My computer is on all day because I'm working on it, and I have it set to automatically back-up at 11:00 and sleep afterwards until 7:00 or 8:00 when I start working. I guess I could just leave it on 24/7 and see if I still have problems.
Message was edited by: sw_i_t_t_e_rs

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Spinning Beach Ball again after new update,,

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Welcome to Apple Discussions!
Please start a new topic thread here:
http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=752&start=0
You may have the same issue, but it can manifest itself in a variety of ways. You'll get a wider audience, and a more likely ability get your problem focussed and solved if you start your own thread.

ITunes 11 hangs (spinning beach ball) in Mountain Lion

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After a few minutes, the beach ball stops and iTunes works fine...for a while. Double clicking on any audio file on my desktop, sets off the spinning beach ball again for another three minutes, at which time iTunes becomes responsive again, but the sound file does not play.
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Okay, I think I've finally solved my problem. I moved my entire iTunes library from one hard drive to another, then I deleted everything from iTunes (selected all songs, hit delete key, but didn't delete songs from disk) and then reimported them by dragging my Music folder into iTunes.
I'm not sure if moving the songs from one disk to another really helped, but deleting and reinstalling the songs definitely did.
I actually let iTunes perform a "scan for music" to reinstall the tracks, but that never seems to bring in everything. I had to drag in all of my compilation disks and some other miscellaneous tracks. P.I.T.A.
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Spinning beach ball in imovie

I am getting the spinning beach ball again in imovie. I should write down the things I was told to do last 4 times this happened but I keep thinking it would not happen again. I have all the updates, and I have removed the imovie plist from the library. What else am I missing?

How much memory do you have installed?

Keynote 4 - selecting text in text frame causes spinning beach ball

One friend of mine called me tonight and was seeking for help. He has Mac OS X 10.5.1 and Keynote 4.0.1. He imported picture in Keynote, added text frame on top of it and typed in some text. Then he went to another slide, but then returned back to resize text in the text frame. As soon he selects text, he gets spinning beach ball of death...
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OK, Carolyn, I wrote down all my prefs (glad I did), trashed the prefs file, restarted, relaunched TextEdit, reset all my preferences to my liking (which had reverted to default settings), quit TextEdit. Then I tried double-clicking some text files -- and the same problem (#2 above) persists. None of my TextEdit or text files have TextEdit as the default launch application -- they're still all either "None" or "ams1108.html". And, as before, if I try to change it to "TextEdit" in the file's info box, then click on "change all," it does not work: not only does it not change all the text files to be TextEdit, but clicking "change all" will cause the file in question to revert to "None" or "ams1108.html". However, if I only change the default app for that one file to TextEdit, and don't click "change all," then it will stick -- for now at least. (Though I wouldn't be surprised if after a restart they all changed back to "None.")
The short assessment is: trashing the prefs did NOT fix problem #2 above. It may or may not have fixed problem #1 -- hard to tell immediately, since the only way to find out is the use TextEdit for two days.
So, setting aside problem #1 for now: any suggestions for fixing problem #2 (default app can't be changed to TextEdit by clicking "change all")? I have thousands and thousands of TextEdit files I use, so changing them all manually one-by-one isn't feasible. Thanks.

Itunes is frozen and the spinning beach ball stays on. i can force quite ok but on opening again it does the same thing. HELP

I have the Mac os 10.6.3. Its been great but the last 4 days iTunes has frozen up. On opening iTunes spinning beach ball starts up and the only way to close iTunes is to force quite. I have nothing plugged into iTunes and i have scand iTunes with mackeeper but nothing. I then uninstalled iTunes and started fresh//./././.// NO GOOD, keeps doing the same thing. HELP

Maybe you should update your 10.6.3 to 10.6.8
http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1399
Update iTunes 10.5.2
http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1426

I accidentally quit my CC on my Macbook pro and now the cloud icon is grayed out and every time I hover over it with the mouse I get the spinning beach ball of death on the icon. I have no idea how to open it because when I use spotlight search to open it

I accidentally quit my CC on my Macbook pro and now the cloud icon is grayed out and every time I hover over it with the mouse I get the spinning beach ball of death on the icon. I have no idea how to open it because when I use spotlight search to open it it gives me a message saying "Creative Cloud is not open anymore" help!

Since you didn't include any pertinent info such as the Mac model and OS version you are running, here is some general information:
Mac OS X: Gray screen appears during startup
Depending on which OS yours came with originally - and which OS you are now running - you would either need your original install disks - you can call Apple for replacements by giving them your serial number. Or you may be able to reinstall the OS by using recovery (again, depends on which model/which OS).

Safari won't open... spinning beach ball

Out of the blue this morning, Safari won't open. I click it, the icon bounces, and then I get the spinning beach ball. If I go to the Force Quit Applications window, it says it's not responding. Any ideas what may be causing this and how to fix it?
-B

What is the exact wording of the message you see, and what are you doing when you see it?
These are the steps I took this morning, again, along with the wording. Before these steps, I logged into my account through the Google browser, and verified that I had a purchase in October of OS X Lion:
1 - booted computer under recovery.
2 - Disk Utility - Repair Disk (Result: The Volume New Macbook appears to be okay)
3 - Disk Utility - Repair Disk Permissions - (Result:0 Repaired - Permissions Repair Complete)
4 - Reinstall Mac OS - "Your computer's eligibility will be verified with Apple - OK
5 - "To Continue, you must agree to the terms and conditions" - Agree
6 - Select New Macbook - Install
7 - signing into Apple Store (Result: This Apple ID has not purchased Lion)
8 - rebooted and tried to launch App Store - back to spinning beach balls, along with all other internet apps; Safari, Mail, App Store, iTunes, etc.
Aps not affected: Google Chrome, Outlook (as long as I don't click on an email connected to an HTTPS server) and anything not on the internet.
I hope this helps and thank you for your advice. I wish I could use my Snow Leopard disks; my dvd drive is broken.

New MacBook and The Infinitely Spinning Beach Ball: Anybody Else?

I wonder if I'm the only MacBook owner having this experience, or if there might be some company in my misery?
I purchased a new Aluminum MacBook on Nov.14. This one is the high-end, 2.4GHz model with 4GB of RAM and currently running OSX 10.5.5.
I have in the past few days (or week, or so) encountered what appears to be an intermittent performance failure. I will, for example, be in Apple Mail: Open a new message to compose, and as soon as I click on the open window, the beach balls starts spinning... and continues to spin for a minute or two. Typically, when this starts happening, when I get the cursor back I click again, and the beachball resumes spinning.
This will also happen in Firefox, or, as it did yesterday, even accessing items in the upper-right menu bar. Suspecting an impending hard-drive failure, I clicked the Time Capsule icon in the menu to see when I got my last backup, and instead of getting Time Capsule, I got... the spinning beach ball of death.
The most difficult thing about this dilemma is that it appears to be intermittent. I took the MacBook to the dealer that sold it to me yesterday, was unable to replicate the issues. Everything worked fine in the store. Came home, problem returned for about 10 or 15 minutes, then it went away and the computer performed normally until I closed the lid to go out for the evening.
Then this morning I opened the lid again and.... spinning beach balls for a total of about 17 minutes. And now, again, it appears to be working fine.
While I was at the store, we ran a disc verify in disk utility, and it returned the message "The volume Macintosh HD appears to be OK."
This is the worst kind of problem -- the intermittent one. I suspect something in the computer itself, in the believe that hardware issues are more likely to be intermittent than software issues; I could be wrong about that, I dunno.
All I do know is that I can have maddening periods when I can't do anything with the computer, and then, just as suddenly, everything goes back to normal.
So I wonder if there might be anything in the circuitry in these new MacBooks that might be causing a similar problem for others. Or is this my unique cross to bear until the thing goes completely south?
Thanks,
--PS

Have you tried running the diagnostics from the Leopard disc? If not, give it a go to see what it finds. To run it, boot while holding the "d" key (with Leopard disc in ofcourse).
Haven't tried that, I did not know that was on the disk. I'll run it, how long might it take? What sort of tests does it run, what sort of results should I expect?
Another thing to try is reset the SMC.
Following the link you provided suggests there might be some things in the SMC that could be causing my problems. Should I do that before or after I run the diagnostics? Would the diagnostics tell me if that's something I need to do?
If still nothing... perhaps a reinstall of Leopard.
I call that the "Vietnam Solution" -- destroying the village in order to save it. I thought was done with that sort of thing when I abandoned PCs and Windows. Not a desirable outcome.
As a last resort, you might consider trying a new hard drive. A failing drive can cause theses intermittent delays.
That was my initial thought, too. Are there any diagnostics I can run besides dick utility to determine the integrity of the hard drive? Do the diagnostics on the Leopard install disk do that?
Thanks,
--PS

Spinning beach ball suddenly? MacBook Pro slowed to a *crawl*

Was updated to 10.6.2 - All of a sudden last night, I started getting the spinning beach ball for like minutes at a time. No better today after multiple reboots - when the system starts up the ball spins and it takes over 10 minutes for my desktop to fully load up and look normal. Then...if I try and open Finder, Mail, Safari, 8-10 minutes of spinning ball, ultimately it WILL respond, but on the next mouse click back to 8-10 minutes of spinning ball and no work getting done When Safari opens after the 10 minutes or so, it works somewhat OK.
Nothing in the system monitor is an obvious probelm - and the CPU usage graphics completely stop working when the ball is spinning a long time.
Here's what I've tried:
verify disk - both from install disk and desktop
verify/repair permissions - same as above - one warning keeps popping up "SUID File.....ARDAGENT has been modified and will not be repaired"??
(verify/repair log at bottom of message)
Reinstalled 10.6 from DVD
Reset PRAM/NVRAM
Reset SMC
Used Font Book to resolve duplicates (only a few)
Still no go - everything runs SO SLOW, ten minutes to reboot and ten minutes if I click on finder at a time of the spinning ball? I have not tried software update yet - frankly haven't had time to wait out the spinning ball!! Time machine seems to still be backing up, mail comes in (mail takes ten minutes to open as well), etc.
Some things done in the last few days - uninstalled some old printers a few days ago - and installed a Lexmark pro905 with 10.6 drivers - all of that has been working fine for a few days. Yesterday one thing I did was relocate a VmFusion "Virtual Machines" folder from "Documents" up to my \Users\tomscal\Virtual Machines. Again, that didn't seem at the time to cause any troubles, I worked late into the afternoon after making that change.
Any suggestions??
Tom
2009-12-19 12:47:05 -0800: Disk Utility started.
2009-12-19 12:47:16 -0800: Verifying volume “Macintosh HD”
2009-12-19 12:47:16 -0800: Starting verification tool:
2009-12-19 12:47:28 -0800: Performing live verification.
2009-12-19 12:48:37 -0800: Checking Journaled HFS Plus volume.
2009-12-19 12:48:37 -0800: Checking extents overflow file.
2009-12-19 12:48:37 -0800: Checking catalog file.
2009-12-19 12:48:37 -0800: Checking multi-linked files.
2009-12-19 12:48:37 -0800: Checking catalog hierarchy.
2009-12-19 12:48:37 -0800: Checking extended attributes file.
2009-12-19 12:48:37 -0800: Checking volume bitmap.
2009-12-19 12:48:37 -0800: Checking volume information.
2009-12-19 12:48:37 -0800: The volume Macintosh HD appears to be OK.
2009-12-19 12:48:38 -0800: Repair tool completed:
2009-12-19 12:48:38 -0800:
2009-12-19 12:48:38 -0800:
2009-12-19 12:51:04 -0800: Verify permissions for “Macintosh HD”
2009-12-19 12:54:14 -0800: ACL found but not expected on "private/etc/apache2/users".
2009-12-19 12:54:14 -0800: ACL found but not expected on "private/etc/postfix/main.cf".
2009-12-19 12:54:14 -0800: ACL found but not expected on "private/etc/postfix/main.cf.default".
2009-12-19 12:54:43 -0800: Warning: SUID file "System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/MacOS/ARDAg ent" has been modified and will not be repaired.
2009-12-19 12:55:01 -0800: ACL found but not expected on "System/Library/Keychains/X509Anchors".
2009-12-19 12:55:39 -0800: ACL found but not expected on "private/etc/hostconfig".
2009-12-19 12:55:42 -0800:
2009-12-19 12:55:42 -0800: Permissions verification complete
2009-12-19 12:55:42 -0800:
2009-12-19 12:55:43 -0800:
2009-12-19 12:59:07 -0800: Repairing permissions for “Macintosh HD”
2009-12-19 13:01:47 -0800: ACL found but not expected on "private/etc/apache2/users".
2009-12-19 13:01:47 -0800: Repaired "private/etc/apache2/users".
2009-12-19 13:01:47 -0800: ACL found but not expected on "private/etc/postfix/main.cf".
2009-12-19 13:01:47 -0800: Repaired "private/etc/postfix/main.cf".
2009-12-19 13:01:47 -0800: ACL found but not expected on "private/etc/postfix/main.cf.default".
2009-12-19 13:01:47 -0800: Repaired "private/etc/postfix/main.cf.default".
2009-12-19 13:02:16 -0800: Warning: SUID file "System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/MacOS/ARDAg ent" has been modified and will not be repaired.
2009-12-19 13:02:33 -0800: ACL found but not expected on "System/Library/Keychains/X509Anchors".
2009-12-19 13:02:33 -0800: Repaired "System/Library/Keychains/X509Anchors".
2009-12-19 13:03:12 -0800: ACL found but not expected on "private/etc/hostconfig".
2009-12-19 13:03:12 -0800: Repaired "private/etc/hostconfig".
2009-12-19 13:03:16 -0800:
2009-12-19 13:03:16 -0800: Permissions repair complete
2009-12-19 13:03:16 -0800:
2009-12-19 13:03:17 -0800:

Well, I tried most of the tips suggested above, and tip/tricks found elsewhere. Nothing worked, I continued to have 10-15 minute hangs with the beach ball spinning. If I clicked on a folder in like Finder, ten minutes would go by then the folder would open. Rebooting took 10-15 minutes.
Finally out of frustration I erased the hard disk using the Disk Utility on the Snow Leopard 10.6 disc, and used migration assistant to restore.
Much to my surprise it worked - the clean install/restore is working OK at the moment.
Hard/long way to fix the problem though.....

Spinning beach ball for 45-60 seconds, then fine

For several months now, I've had the spinning beach ball issue on my Macbook Pro. Within the first 5 minutes after boot up, the spinning beach ball will occur, seemingly at random (no specific app or action), for 45-60 seconds. While this happens, the system becomes completely unresponsive. But after this occurrence within the first five minutes after startup, it never happens again and everything is fine - until I reboot of course.
I am running Snow Leopard and this problem was happening before I installed Snow Leopard, so that's not it. But one thing I did do, which I am semi-convinced is the culprit, is I replaced my hard drive with a Seagate 500 mb Momentus drive. The actual model # is SEAST9500420AS. I don't know for sure, but that's around the time this issue first started. I know there is/was a spinning beach ball problem with the newer Macbook Pros and they were attributing it to the hard drive which just so happens to be the same hard drive I now have in my Macbook Pro. There was recently an EFI update that seemed to fix the problem for the newer models, but mine is the first generation right when they went to Intel chips (bought mine in April, 2006). Problem is, if it is my drive, this new EFI update that fixes the issue on the new models won't install on mine.
I also did a verify disk and repair disk permissions, but that was no help. Another thing I found going through the discussion groups was that the problem could happen because both the Macbook Pro and the Seagate drive have anti-shock technology that could conflict with one another. So if you disabled the anti-shock on the Macbook Pro, it might solve the problem as it seemed to for some folks out there. But I did that and it didn't help either.
I'm thinking it's my hard drive, but don't know how to fix it. But it could be something I haven't looked at yet or thought of. I've been trying everything the last several months with no luck and it's been driving me batty! What's really strange is it only happens once and always within the first 5 minutes after start up. Anybody have any suggestions? Thanks.

I just finished doing lots of different tests to try to solve my problem. Didn't resolve it, but I did manage to eliminate some things and narrow it down further.
First I removed all my login items and restarted my computer. That didn't fix the problem.
So then I thought it might have something to do with Safari since that's one of the first things I open up when I start my computer and there are numerous reports in the discussions of spinning beach balls with Safari 4.0.3 which I have. So I purposely did not open Safari after startup. Problem still happened.
So then I thought maybe it has something to do with my internet connection. So I disconnected my internet connection and rebooted. Then I only opened programs that don't use online access. I leisurely opened up a program, did a few things in it, closed it, and then did the same thing with another program. Did some things with Finder. Purposely did not rush things. Waited 4-5 seconds after every operation's completion before executing another task. Never had more than one program open at any given time to eliminate any issue with two many resources open. You guessed it - the problem STILL happened. Not that it matters, but it happened when I hit Command-I on my hard drive icon to get the info pane. A fairly innocuous task. Froze up with the spinning beach ball for at least 45-50 seconds. Tried clicking a few other things while this was happening, but nothing. Once it freed up, a few things I clicked on previously suddenly became active and everything was fine again. Tried Command-I for a lot of different things with no problem. Response was instantaneous.
It pretty much happens 3-4 minutes into a session and then never happens again. And I think my test here eliminated several possibilities. Very frustrating. I hope this helps someone come up with a possible solution. Thanks.

Spinning beach ball woes on 27 inch iMac

We have a mid 2010 27 inch iMac (and also a late 2010 13 inch MacBook Air, from which I am writing this post). About 6 months ago it was starting to get spinning beach balls, which I attributed to not having updated the OS (then 10.7). Having upgraded the Air to Mavericks with success, I also upgraded the iMac to Mavericks, and the beach balls got much, much worse, rendering the thing nearly unusable. I cannot for the life of me figure out what the issue is, particularly because the Air, which is about the same vintage, is working great under the same setup. Can someone who has not been staring at this problem for 6 months help?
Here's what I've got:
As I mentioned, mid 2010 27-inch iMac, 1TB hard drive, about half-full, backing up to a 2 TB Time Capsule.
We have two wifi networks to cover the whole house; one is integrated with the cable company's provided router and sits in the basement, and the other is the Time Capsule hooked up to the cable company's VoIP router upstairs. Because you cannot use the Time Capsule to extend an existing network if it is not an Apple network, I resorted to setting each wifi network up independently (separately connected to ethernet). My Air navigates this just fine, as do our iPads/iPhones, and I don't notice a speed difference between the two networks (assuming I have equally good reception wherever I am).
Notably, the Time Capsule seems to randomly stop broadcasting wifi every now and then (at intervals of a few days to a couple weeks), which requires a restart to get it working again. (This could be totally unrelated.)
The iMac was at 10.7 when the beach balls started; upgrading to Mavericks made the slowness/beachballs worse. As I noted, Mavericks did not cause any trouble with the Air.
The beach balls seem to coincide with a complete stall in everything the computer is doing. After the stall ends, the computer can be fairly speedy, so it's as if it pauses for several seconds to a minute or so to think very hard, and then goes back to its business.
There is usually a slight improvement if I shut down and boot up again, but it gums up pretty quickly.
Here's what I've done:
Started with 4GB RAM; added another 8 (total 12) after this all started. Equally bad before and after.
Stared at Activity Monitor and Console for long periods of time while watching for beach balls to try to detect a pattern.
In Activity Monitor, memory pressure is fine (esp. now that I added 8 GB), no swap used. The two worst offenders under CPU usage seem to be kernel_task or WindowServer, but they are not always monopolizing the CPU at the times when it is stalled.
In Console, the main two patterns seemed to be a frequent WindowServer "updates forcibly disabled" error, and what seemed like a constant browsing for wifi connections even though the computer was already connected to wifi. However, I couldn't figure out what either of these meant or what might be done to fix them.
Used disk utility, repaired permissions, verified disk, etc. - everything was ok, although some permissions were repaired.
Used third-party utilities, Onyx and iDefrag, to try to verify disk and clean things up. No significant problems detected, and no improvement.
Various other methods of cleaning up -- eliminating old software or files that aren't being used, emptying trash, taking extra files off the desktop, etc. In particular, having read that Mail might have issues handling Google accounts, I eliminated a heavily-used Google account from Mail and got a separate, lighter-weight third-party app to handle that account. That did seem improve things at first, but we seem to be back to slowness and beach balls again.
Final, last-ditch effort: backed up and then erased hard drive and (after another Disk Utility verify - still fine) did a clean install of Mavericks.
It took several attempts to download the installer using the Time Capsule network (kept stalling); switched to the other (non-Apple) wifi network and it downloaded and installed fine.
However, after the clean install, although it was not nearly as slow as before, amazingly, I still had spinning beach balls and hanging without having installed anything other than the OS.
I made several attempts to get into the backup to selectively reinstall files. Could not mount backup using Time Capsule -- option-clicking and selecting "Browse Other Backups" did not actually get me to the other backup. Using Migration Assistant, could not get the backup to load, or the loading was taking an inordinately long period of time, so I gave up. (Also, every time I tried to quit Migration Assistant to try to discover the problem with the backup loading, it hung and I had to hard-restart.)
So, since the clean install did not seem to fix the problem, and I was starting to worry about not being able to get to my backup, I have gone back to just restoring from the Time Capsule. It's telling me this will take over 200 hours.
The one thing I haven't tried is shutting down the computer, lugging it upstairs, and connecting it to Time Capsule via ethernet, at least for the restoration. I will do this if I leave the computer overnight and it's still not done in the morning.
I've done much searching of these discussion boards, and tried everything that seemed like a possible culprit. What am I missing? (Other than ditching this computer and buying a different one?)

We have a mid 2010 27 inch iMac (and also a late 2010 13 inch MacBook Air, from which I am writing this post). About 6 months ago it was starting to get spinning beach balls, which I attributed to not having updated the OS (then 10.7). Having upgraded the Air to Mavericks with success, I also upgraded the iMac to Mavericks, and the beach balls got much, much worse, rendering the thing nearly unusable. I cannot for the life of me figure out what the issue is, particularly because the Air, which is about the same vintage, is working great under the same setup. Can someone who has not been staring at this problem for 6 months help?
Here's what I've got:
As I mentioned, mid 2010 27-inch iMac, 1TB hard drive, about half-full, backing up to a 2 TB Time Capsule.
We have two wifi networks to cover the whole house; one is integrated with the cable company's provided router and sits in the basement, and the other is the Time Capsule hooked up to the cable company's VoIP router upstairs. Because you cannot use the Time Capsule to extend an existing network if it is not an Apple network, I resorted to setting each wifi network up independently (separately connected to ethernet). My Air navigates this just fine, as do our iPads/iPhones, and I don't notice a speed difference between the two networks (assuming I have equally good reception wherever I am).
Notably, the Time Capsule seems to randomly stop broadcasting wifi every now and then (at intervals of a few days to a couple weeks), which requires a restart to get it working again. (This could be totally unrelated.)
The iMac was at 10.7 when the beach balls started; upgrading to Mavericks made the slowness/beachballs worse. As I noted, Mavericks did not cause any trouble with the Air.
The beach balls seem to coincide with a complete stall in everything the computer is doing. After the stall ends, the computer can be fairly speedy, so it's as if it pauses for several seconds to a minute or so to think very hard, and then goes back to its business.
There is usually a slight improvement if I shut down and boot up again, but it gums up pretty quickly.
Here's what I've done:
Started with 4GB RAM; added another 8 (total 12) after this all started. Equally bad before and after.
Stared at Activity Monitor and Console for long periods of time while watching for beach balls to try to detect a pattern.
In Activity Monitor, memory pressure is fine (esp. now that I added 8 GB), no swap used. The two worst offenders under CPU usage seem to be kernel_task or WindowServer, but they are not always monopolizing the CPU at the times when it is stalled.
In Console, the main two patterns seemed to be a frequent WindowServer "updates forcibly disabled" error, and what seemed like a constant browsing for wifi connections even though the computer was already connected to wifi. However, I couldn't figure out what either of these meant or what might be done to fix them.
Used disk utility, repaired permissions, verified disk, etc. - everything was ok, although some permissions were repaired.
Used third-party utilities, Onyx and iDefrag, to try to verify disk and clean things up. No significant problems detected, and no improvement.
Various other methods of cleaning up -- eliminating old software or files that aren't being used, emptying trash, taking extra files off the desktop, etc. In particular, having read that Mail might have issues handling Google accounts, I eliminated a heavily-used Google account from Mail and got a separate, lighter-weight third-party app to handle that account. That did seem improve things at first, but we seem to be back to slowness and beach balls again.
Final, last-ditch effort: backed up and then erased hard drive and (after another Disk Utility verify - still fine) did a clean install of Mavericks.
It took several attempts to download the installer using the Time Capsule network (kept stalling); switched to the other (non-Apple) wifi network and it downloaded and installed fine.
However, after the clean install, although it was not nearly as slow as before, amazingly, I still had spinning beach balls and hanging without having installed anything other than the OS.
I made several attempts to get into the backup to selectively reinstall files. Could not mount backup using Time Capsule -- option-clicking and selecting "Browse Other Backups" did not actually get me to the other backup. Using Migration Assistant, could not get the backup to load, or the loading was taking an inordinately long period of time, so I gave up. (Also, every time I tried to quit Migration Assistant to try to discover the problem with the backup loading, it hung and I had to hard-restart.)
So, since the clean install did not seem to fix the problem, and I was starting to worry about not being able to get to my backup, I have gone back to just restoring from the Time Capsule. It's telling me this will take over 200 hours.
The one thing I haven't tried is shutting down the computer, lugging it upstairs, and connecting it to Time Capsule via ethernet, at least for the restoration. I will do this if I leave the computer overnight and it's still not done in the morning.
I've done much searching of these discussion boards, and tried everything that seemed like a possible culprit. What am I missing? (Other than ditching this computer and buying a different one?)

ITunes 7.7 Update and iPod classic = Spinning Beach Ball

Just upgraded to the new iTunes 7.7 (iphone 2.0 and app store support). After, I plugged in my ipod classic and it took almost 5 minutes of the "spinning beach ball" to recognize the ipod. I check and it says my software (1.1.2) is up to date. I ejected and tried it again. Same thing. Once recognized, the ipod classic seems to work fine in iTunes, but still not sure about all options.
Anyone else upgrade iTunes and find the same thing happening?
Note: No option to sync ipod classic games any more. A new "Applications" designation listed in iTunes 7.7 (which has my purchased games listed), but no way to "sync" them or resync them if there were to be an issue or if I wanted to remove the game now and sync it again later...

I'm having the same problem. Last night I wanted to update my iPhone to 2.0 so I had to update iTunes first. When I connect my iPhone, everything works fine (thank God). But quite a different story when I connected my 80 GB classic today. Spinning beachball, iPod icon appears on desktop and in Finder, but iTunes does not show my iPod.
I've tried everything I can think of from resetting my iPod to reinstalling iTunes. Nothing has worked for me.
Is there no fix to this yet? Has anyone solved the problem? Are we suppose to wait for Apple to solve this problem?
Dirk

I have an early 2008 Mac Pro, which has re-booting problems. Also what does the spinning beach-ball indicate?

Hi, I have an early 2008 Mac Pro which has re-booting problems.
Processor speed is: 2.8
Memory: 2GB 800 MHz DDR2 FB-DIMM
2 x 28GHz Quad Core Intel Xeon
I am running OSX Yosemite Version 10.10
My Mac Pro keeps re-booting. Last year I had to replace my graphics card. My original card was the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT 255MB, and that is what I have now. At this precise moment my Mac Pro is running perfectly, except that it is slow and the spinning beach-ball keeps appearing. I have managed to do some work with the disk utilities, verifying, cleaning and partitioning. Some errors were found and when it was cleaned this seemed to help my Mac Pro to function properly. Although I am able to use my Mac Pro now, from day to day I still experience re-boot problems. Also quite unexpectedly my mac dictionary has an error, it closed itself down and will not open at all, I had the message to say that a report will be sent to Apple.
I have tried starting my computer with an external hard drive fitted via a USB cable, I use for back-ups. This worked and I was able to wipe my hard drive clear and replace all info from the back up I had done only a few days ago.
This worked for a few days and then the same problem started again.
I am beginning to wonder if I need to buy a new hard drive.
If there is anyone who has some answers to help me solve my problem, I would be most grateful.
Robert

When you have the beachball activity, note the exact time: hour, minute, second.
These instructions must be carried out as an administrator. If you have only one user account, you are the administrator.
Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad and start typing the name.
The title of the Console window should be All Messages. If it isn't, select
          SYSTEM LOG QUERIES ▹ All Messages
from the log list on the left. If you don't see that list, select
          View ▹ Show Log List
from the menu bar at the top of the screen.
Each message in the log begins with the date and time when it was entered. Scroll back to the time you noted above.
Select the messages entered from then until the end of the episode, or until they start to repeat, whichever comes first.
Copy the messages to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Paste into a reply to this message by pressing command-V.
The log contains a vast amount of information, almost all of it useless for solving any particular problem. When posting a log extract, be selective. A few dozen lines are almost always more than enough.
Please don't indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.
Please don't post screenshots of log messages—post the text.
Some private information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.

Spinning beach ball FFv21, mac os 10.6.8, seizes control of my computer every 10 seconds - Im going mad!!

Duplicate see [/questions/960928]
Im going insane with the spinning beachball on mac when using Firefox v21.
It happens several times per minute with something as simple as choosing the next field on a page or even scrolling down the page using the scroller on the right hand of the page.
Im on a laptop which has os 10.6.8 installed and the laptop has 8gig of ram and a 2.8ghz intel core 2 duo processor.
On previous versions of Firefox I used to get "unresponsive script" warnings with the option to stop it. These warnings would pop up and never give the option to "always stop an unresponsive script AND never take total control of my computer trying to get the script to respond"
There is no option to block the script on the site its coming from.
I did have a block script plug in but no sites work properly if java script isnt enabled.
With Firefox21 I dont get these pop up warnings any more.
I have a lot of tabs open and when the spinning beach ball happens too often I quit firefox and open it again. It remembers my tabs but doesnt load till I click on the tab.
Despite this Firefox will start stalling and showing the beachball spinning only after a few new pages are opened.
It is enfuriating and I dont consider the software to be working properly.
Im wondering has something gottten corrupted in the System Library when firefox installs or if there is a compatability problem with versions of Firefox, my OS10.6.8, Java, Flash?
I can only look at one tab at a time - I WOULD LOVE IF THERE WAS AN OPTION TO
"NOT GIVE ANY RESOURCES TO OTHER TABS WHICH ARENT BEING VIEWED"
I used to use a plug in called Pause All Tabs which was brilliant and gave me back control of my computer. I cant get it for FF21
So what can I do? Use Chrome instead?

Locking as duplicate. Please see and continue with [/questions/960928]

Spinning beach ball (again)

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