iMac mouse freezing up, constant beachball

[Natural Science]

Hi All,

I'm highly mac illiterate so please bear with me! I have a late '09 I5 quad core iMac which lately has been slowing up with the beachball consistantly appearing for minutes at a time with even just itunes or safari open. Then it froze up one night and (not knowing what else to do) I held the power button in until it shut down, waited 30 sec and rebooted only to have a blue screen appear and nothing else. Finally I unplugged the power supply and rebooted and everything seemed fine. I took it to the Genuis Bar and he said everything was working. SO, I went ahead and ordered 8g more of ram from Macsales.com to give me 12 in total thinking maybe that was the issue. Then just today, the magic mouse randomly froze on my screen and after 20 min of trying to reboot with the keyboard, I again had to manually power down and reboot. I even replaced the batteries in the mouse before shutting it down. Is anything wrong? All I've installed is MS Office, a Big Bird game, and Handbrake, all which have been on the machine for months! Sorry for the long post but I'm quite freaked out at the moment.

 

[Hellhammer]

Sounds like an HD issue. Have you ran Disk Utility?

 

[Natural Science]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

No I have not... I looked in apple prefences but could not find it... Can running that do any unitended damage to the machine? Thanks for the repy!

 

[Hellhammer]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

No I have not... I looked in apple prefences but could not find it... Can running that do any unitended damage to the machine? Thanks for the repy!

You can find it from Applications > Utilities, or just use Spotlight. I cannot cause any damage as it is meant to check the heath of the HD. Just repair permissions and verify the disk with it.

 

[Natural Science]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

Thanks so much... I'll run it when I get home and certainly befor I put the extra ram in. Will it tell me if there is an issue with the hardrive? If not, is it just resetting the computer's settings (again, sorry for the complete ignorance!)

 

[Hellhammer]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

Thanks so much... I'll run it when I get home and certainly befor I put the extra ram in. Will it tell me if there is an issue with the hardrive? If not, is it just resetting the computer's settings (again, sorry for the complete ignorance!)

It just check that everything is okay with the disk and OS X. It's one of the first steps that you should do when troubleshooting. It's not 100% sure that it can discover a problem even though there was one but in most cases it will.

 

[ctucci]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

Thanks so much... I'll run it when I get home and certainly befor I put the extra ram in. Will it tell me if there is an issue with the hardrive? If not, is it just resetting the computer's settings (again, sorry for the complete ignorance!)

Usually the diskutility just checks for and repairs file permissions to what they should be. It does show a log of the repaired files during the process.

I'm going to guess Imac? If so, I've seen lots of heat issues and the occasional hd failure with the 24s. If you're still in applecare, you're in great shape!

 

[Natural Science]

I ran disk utility and there was an error in the permissions that said could not be fixed. I shutdown and started up in safe mode, everything went ok, then I shut down and upon re-booting realized i could not get the iMac out of safe mode (i wasn't holding any keys while it was booting), so I put the Mac OSx disc in, shut down, rebooted again and re-ran disk utility. It said the Mac HD was OK, but the same permissions error popped up. I also read that there should not be a status bar on the white screen with the apple logo, which I have consistently. Now I also see the blue screen a few seconds everytime I boot (it may have been there all along, I never took notice until my machine began freezing up on it periodically). Finally today my wife was in Safari and locked up and when she tried force quit the error message told here Safari was unable to force quit. What the heck is going on? Again, we are very computer illiterate, which is why we dropped $2k on a mac in the first place. The apple care closes at 9pm, so I'm kind of lost. I attached two screen shots (I didn't even know how to do that either, hope they turned out). ANY help or advice would be huge!

 

[skyvueone]

looks similar to what I had.If you have snow leopard read on.
Genius bar told me all was great physically, they had it for 3 weeks.
so after a clean install using snow leopard the beach ball appeared again & again and the screen frooze there. So I did another clean install but with Leopard this time. It s been over 60 days now and it hasn't shown any signs of the eternal beach ball or multicolor screen jam.
its worth a try, remove snow leopard.