Spinning Beachball of Death . . . why did I have to Force Quit ???

Question

Folks:
Last week I had an episode of multiple recurring "application not
responding" errors while trying to select and scroll down through a couple
hundred pages of text in a manuscript of approx. 1.8 MB in size in my word processor, Mellel. As I scrolled down about half way the spinning beachball started spinning and the scrolling process became slow, sluggish, and then unresponsive . . . . I force quit and repeated another 2x to no different response. Finally did "select all" to whole doc and then had to go in to the few pages that I had originally not wanted to select and change them to back to what I wanted . . . a little bit "bassakwards" but I got it done the old fashioned way. Now, when I attempt to "save edits" as I'm going thru my doc the beachball will spin for different periods of time. This is mostly an all text doc with just two (2) photos that have been "inserted" into the doc--seems like the photo's are smaller files than the original, and about 250 pp.
So, the question is is mr Mel (Mellel) trying to tell me something about my system; is this perchance a sign that Macinto II (the 2nd HD in the iBook) is coming close to its ultimate demise? A few years back I began having "issues" with mr Mel that eventually were shown to be signs of the end of Macinto I (named after the famous Seminole Indian chief who fought the US Army to a draw in the Everglades). I had just run the Apple Hardware test just a few days before this
recent episode all happened and it seemed to be OK. But it has been mentioned
here that mr Mel is "processor intensive" and could be just testing the limits
of my 2nd HD??? OR is the test over and all that is left is the funeral pyre for
Macinto II??
Would essentially a 2MB Mellel file be too large for my 933 MHz G4 iBook
with 640 MB DDR SDRAM running Mellel 2.2.7 (build b9) on 10.4.11 . . . to handle
even if it was totally in fighting condition?? Or is the probably 3 year old HD
being brought to expiration by having to deal with running the features that are
brought to the table by mr Mel??
Thanks for any thoughts,
eep

Answer 1

Word processors typically load a large portion of a file into RAM for editing. When more of the document is needed it pages out the unneeded portion and reads more of the document into RAM. So in practice no document is too large. None of your "surmises" would seem to make sense.
A more likely scenario is disk corruption or file corruption assuming the hard drive isn't failing. Continued forced shutdown of the computer is a sure fire way to corrupt a hard drive if not cause it fatal damage.
I suggest reading the following:
Kappy's Personal Suggestions for OS X Maintenance
For disk repairs use Disk Utility. For situations DU cannot handle the best third-party utilities are: Disk Warrior; DW only fixes problems with the disk directory, but most disk problems are caused by directory corruption; Disk Warrior 4.x is now Intel Mac compatible. TechTool Pro provides additional repair options including file repair and recovery, system diagnostics, and disk defragmentation. TechTool Pro 4.5.1 or higher are Intel Mac compatible; Drive Genius is similar to TechTool Pro in terms of the various repair services provided. Versions 1.5.1 or later are Intel Mac compatible.
OS X performs certain maintenance functions that are scheduled to occur on a daily, weekly, or monthly period. The maintenance scripts run in the early AM only if the computer is turned on 24/7 (no sleep.) If this isn't the case, then an excellent solution is to download and install a shareware utility such as Macaroni, JAW PseudoAnacron, or Anacron that will automate the maintenance activity regardless of whether the computer is turned off or asleep. Dependence upon third-party utilities to run the periodic maintenance scripts had been significantly reduced in Tiger and Leopard.
OS X automatically defrags files less than 20 MBs in size, so unless you have a disk full of very large files there's little need for defragmenting the hard drive. As for virus protection there are few if any such animals affecting OS X. You can protect the computer easily using the freeware Open Source virus protection software ClamXAV. Personally I would avoid most commercial anti-virus software because of their potential for causing problems.
I would also recommend downloading the shareware utility TinkerTool System that you can use for periodic maintenance such as removing old logfiles and archives, clearing caches, etc.
For emergency repairs install the freeware utility Applejack. If you cannot start up in OS X, you may be able to start in single-user mode from which you can run Applejack to do a whole set of repair and maintenance routines from the commandline. Note that AppleJack 1.5 is required for Leopard.
When you install any new system software or updates be sure to repair the hard drive and permissions beforehand. I also recommend booting into safe mode before doing system software updates.
Get an external Firewire drive at least equal in size to the internal hard drive and make (and maintain) a bootable clone/backup. You can make a bootable clone using the Restore option of Disk Utility. You can also make and maintain clones with good backup software. My personal recommendations are (order is not significant):
1. Retrospect Desktop (Commercial - not yet universal binary)
2. Synchronize! Pro X (Commercial)
3. Synk (Backup, Standard, or Pro)
4. Deja Vu (Shareware)
5. Carbon Copy Cloner (Donationware)
6. SuperDuper! (Commercial)
7. Intego Personal Backup (Commercial)
8. Data Backup (Commercial)
9. SilverKeeper 2.0 (Freeware)
10. MimMac (Commercial)
11. CloneTool Hatchery (Shareware)
12. Clone X (Commercial)
The following utilities can also be used for backup, but cannot create bootable clones:
1. Backup (requires a .Mac account with Apple both to get the software and to use it.)
2. Toast
3. Impression
4. arRSync
Apple's Backup is a full backup tool capable of also backing up across multiple media such as CD/DVD. However, it cannot create bootable backups. It is primarily an "archiving" utility as are the other two.
Impression and Toast are disk image based backups, only. Particularly useful if you need to backup to CD/DVD across multiple media.
Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQs on maintenance, optimization, virus protection, and backup and restore.
Additional suggestions will be found in Mac Maintenance Quick Assist.
Referenced software can be found at www.versiontracker.com and www.macupdate.com.