My macbook pro running latest Catalina showing beachballs when opening text and images with Textedit & Preview

[shankar2]

Hi so I updated to latest Catalina 10.15.3 and I'm seeing beachballs (with delay) when I open any text documents using the Textedit app and also any image file using the Preview app.

Does anyone have any fixes for this? Has anyone been encountering the same problem as above? Please advise. Thanks!

 

[shankar2]

So I've reset smc and nvram on my mac but Textedit & Preview apps are still causing beachballs... any tips to reset these 2 apps? Thanks!

 

[Ritsuka]

Maybe it's related to Dropbox: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/annoying-freeze-and-spinning-wheel-in-preview-catalina.2220788/

 

[Populus]

I’ve read that you were already complaining about beachballs on Chrome, and in previous iterations of Catalina.

Is your main drive an SSD? Or a traditional, mechanical HDD? If your bootable drive is not an SSD that could explain the beachballs all over the place.

Just for reference, I tried to use my original Mac mini mechanical HDD with Mojave and sometimes it is just impossible to work due to how slow is everything, always with beach ball...

I suspect Sierra or even High Sierra were the last operating systems that worked well with mechanical hard drives. Mojave was performing bad on an HDD and that’s why I switched to an SSD for Catalina. I recommend you do the same.

 

[shankar2]

Hi @Ritsuka yes! I too have dropbox and sometimes beachball shows up in dropbox directories! thanks! I'll check the other thread you mentioned.
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Maybe it's related to Dropbox: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/annoying-freeze-and-spinning-wheel-in-preview-catalina.2220788/

Hi Ritsuka so the temporary fix mentioned in the thread above you mentioned worked for me! Thanks so much!