beach ball nightmare

[draculaxxx]

I have a late 2012 iMac. Lately it started to act up: beach ball appears all the time to the point that the computer is unusable, even when all I do is online surfing. I thought it may be a software issue, and I re-installed Yosemite clean. I still get the beach ball. I verified the disk with disk utilities and I get no errors.

Does anyone have any idea what may be wrong or how to debug?

 

[Taz Mangus]

I have a late 2012 iMac. Lately it started to act up: beach ball appears all the time to the point that the computer is unusable, even when all I do is online surfing. I thought it may be a software issue, and I re-installed Yosemite clean. I still get the beach ball. I verified the disk with disk utilities and I get no errors.

Does anyone have any idea what may be wrong or how to debug?

When you say you did a clean install did you migrate back over any OS system files that you had backed up? Time Machine by default will backup most everything including OS system files unless you exclude them from the backup.

I would suggest booting into safe mode (hold shift while booting) and see if you still the beach balling issue. If you don't then you may have a third party app or driver installed that may be causing the issue. Maybe a Safari extension is causing the beach ball issue.

Also, if you create a new user, reboot, login to the new user, does the issue happen?

 

[draculaxxx]

when I say a clean install, I mean that I formatted the hard drive, booted from a flash drive and re-installed the system. The issue (beach ball) persists even when l log in with the guest account.

 

[mikecwest]

when I say a clean install, I mean that I formatted the hard drive, booted from a flash drive and re-installed the system. The issue (beach ball) persists even when l log in with the guest account.

Your hard drive might me failing, and or you might have a faulty or failed ram chip.

 

[simonsi]

Activity Monitor, post screenshots of CPU (sorted with highest at top), and Memory (sorted by same).

Also possible your HDD is starting to fail - for that you could install DriveDX and see what it says about error counts...

 

[Taz Mangus]

when I say a clean install, I mean that I formatted the hard drive, booted from a flash drive and re-installed the system. The issue (beach ball) persists even when l log in with the guest account.

Try booting into safe mode. Does the issue still happen?