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MacBooks <3 Beachballs

S

Stadsport

macrumors regular
Original poster
Nov 9, 2006
162
0
My friend had a 2.0 ghz Core Duo MacBook about a year back. It liked to randomly beachball. "That sucks," I thought.
Now, lately, mine has been beachballing a lot. And I can't figure out why. It's very hard to pinpoint since it's been doing it across formats (which were unrelated, but I noticed it nonetheless).
I asked my brother, his MacBook is only a couple months old. His has been beachballing a lot, too. So has my boyfriend's.

So what the hell? Do MacBooks just like to beachball? It's incredibly annoying and seems to do it at any given moment for no apparent reason.
My machine has 2GB ram, too, so it's not like I'm pagefiling a lot.
 
XheartcoreboyX said:
what a beachball is ?! XD
Click to expand...
spinner.gif
 
What programs are you running when it beachballs? Mine doesn't have any problems and rarely beachballs.
 
XheartcoreboyX said:
eh i didnt know it was called beacball =P
well anyway,its probably because you been doing heavy stuff on your macbook or maybe something that eats the ram is running in the background..
Click to expand...
Its happened between formats, so it's not an issue of background programs running. Nothing is eating RAM, and I have 2GB. It might happen when I'm quietly browsing the web or if I'm running iPhoto, Photoshop, Azureus, and VMWare.
makismagoo99 said:
What programs are you running when it beachballs? Mine doesn't have any problems and rarely beachballs.
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As I said, anything from Adium and Safari to everything on my dock. It's not an issue of there being a lot running, it's pretty much random. I virtually always have Safari, Adium, and Colloquy running, but I have more than enough RAM for that.
 
my macbook beach balls alot on firefox, I'm about to switch back to safari!!!
 
Do you use Transmission at all? I upgraded to the new version and when Transmission is running my MBP goes incredibly slow - someone thinks there is a memory leak somewhere in the Transmission program.

Repaired disk permissions recently?
 
It's done mainly at night, on the seashore or lakeshore.






(it's when your computer is telling you to wait for some process to finish, by turning the cursor into an image of a spinning beachball -- sometimes also called a pizza wheel or the wheel of death. Earlier incarnations of the same cursor included a hand counting with its fingers, a 'dog-cow' doing backflips, and an egg timer.)
 
OP, post a screen shot from Activity Monitor so we can see what's going on in your MB.
 
iMacBook said:
Apple equivalent of Windows BSoD.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=spinning+beach+ball+of+death
Click to expand...

It's not even close to that. If the app you are trying to use is using too much processing power, you get the beach ball. If the app your in has badly written code, you get the beach ball. If you are using non universal programs, you'll get the beach ball. And if you are surfing the web and you hit bad scripts, you'll get the beach ball.

If the beach ball stays on too long you just force quit the program. The ONE program, not the entire operating system, unlike windows.

Here's a tip though, especially if you're in myspace, if you get the beach ball and you can't do anything, like force quit, open another program and then use that program to get into the force quit application.
 
Sbrocket said:
Any network servers connected, perchance?
Click to expand...
Nope

JasonMac said:
my macbook beach balls alot on firefox, I'm about to switch back to safari!!!
Click to expand...
A friend of mine noted it does it mostly with Safari. I thought this was true at first and tried only using Firefox or Camino, but found it didn't really reduce frequency.

garethh said:
I've noticed that mine beachballs more when I have more icons on the desktop.
Click to expand...
I've got two icons on my desktop.

Kilamite said:
Do you use Transmission at all? I upgraded to the new version and when Transmission is running my MBP goes incredibly slow - someone thinks there is a memory leak somewhere in the Transmission program.

Repaired disk permissions recently?
Click to expand...
No I don't, and I've repaired disk permissions, repaired the disc, reset PRAM and NVRAM.

rdowns said:
OP, post a screen shot from Activity Monitor so we can see what's going on in your MB.
Click to expand...
I'm too lazy to upload a screenshot but I watch it pretty closely and it's quite normal. I've been leaving it running lately in effort to see what it does during a beachball, but I have yet to get one since last night!

NextTuesday said:
You can recover from a beachball attack. By having patience and knowing how to force quit. But once you get a BSoD on the Windows side of things, your screwed.
Click to expand...
I usually just wait it out, it's only like 30 seconds.

Just to note, last night I turned off "Allow the Hard Drive to sleep" in Energy Saver (in both AC and Battery power). This is something I used to have disabled, I guess I forgot to re-disable it after one of my formats. It seems to have helped (knock on wood).
 
JasonMac said:
my macbook beach balls alot on firefox, I'm about to switch back to safari!!!
Click to expand...

My MB always seems to beachball when I am clicking OK trying to open/save a file in Firefox :
picture1lu9.png



Haven't noticed it so much in Safari. Anyone else?
 
citi said:
It's not even close to that. If the app you are trying to use is using too much processing power, you get the beach ball. If the app your in has badly written code, you get the beach ball. If you are using non universal programs, you'll get the beach ball. And if you are surfing the web and you hit bad scripts, you'll get the beach ball.

If the beach ball stays on too long you just force quit the program. The ONE program, not the entire operating system, unlike windows.

Here's a tip though, especially if you're in myspace, if you get the beach ball and you can't do anything, like force quit, open another program and then use that program to get into the force quit application.
Click to expand...

Whoops. My bad. I was just looking through this thread, and I saw that beachball. My bad. I was wrong. Please forgive.
 
i acually get this with alot of frequency too. usually while looking at pages with flash videos or when using flip4mac. sometimes i come back and the computer has been sitting idle all day and the beachball will just be there, and then i have to hard restart because nothing with respond to anything. i'm going to try a 10.4.9 downgrade. nothing about my mac experience has been good since 10.4.10.
 
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