spinning ball

[marysville]

I run a 6 year old iMac, with the latest OS
In the past few week the spinning color thing has ofter keep spinning when I click on anything.
A few times the spinning stopped and all seemed frozen. I did a shut down by the button on the back and then rebooted. All worked well, but later the spinning ball continue to take a long time to activate what ever it was I clicked on.

Ideas as to what might be happening and/or how to fix?

 

[maflynn]

Check out the Disk Utility and see if SMART is returning any errors

 

[bent christian]

I run a 6 year old iMac, with the latest OS
In the past few week the spinning color thing has ofter keep spinning when I click on anything.
A few times the spinning stopped and all seemed frozen. I did a shut down by the button on the back and then rebooted. All worked well, but later the spinning ball continue to take a long time to activate what ever it was I clicked on.

Ideas as to what might be happening and/or how to fix?

If you are on Sierra, it could be any number of things. Apple has a very difficult time providing support for it's own legacy hardware.

Among the first checks should be free disk space. If you are running low, consider emptying the cache using Onyx or Ccleaner.

 

[OldGuyTom]

It sounds like a drive, and it's about the age a drive might decide to up and die. Go to http://scsc-online.com, then click on their how-to link along the top of the site. A list of articles should show up. In the list of articles is one on hard drive problems, but it also provides a bunch of info on other things that can act similarly, like having too little disk space left.

 

[BrianBaughn]

We can speculate but you should let us know:

Exact Mac Model
Hard drive size, type and free space
Amount of RAM
Any apps installed that run in the background (Anti-Virus, System Monitoring, etc.)
Any browser extensions installed

 

[marysville]

Check out the Disk Utility and see if SMART is returning any errors

Thanks for the reply, but what is "SMART"?

 

[maflynn]

Thanks for the reply, but what is "SMART"?

Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology

Its internal diagnostics that hard drives run, and report. There are utilties that can read the results and report back. Apple's Disk Utility is one that provides some level of reporting and it will detail if the drive is having issues.

 

[roadkill401]

If you are on Sierra, it could be any number of things. Apple has a very difficult time providing support for it's own legacy hardware.

Among the first checks should be free disk space. If you are running low, consider emptying the cache using Onyx or Ccleaner.

I think it goes deeper than that. Apple is having problems writing a decent defect free OS. I will refrain from using the word bug as i think the problems go deeper than being small. I have a 2014 5k iMac and have had that issue from El-Cap onwards. Apple says the hardware is perfectly fine so that leaves the OS and guess what. Apple Care only covers the hardware and not the software that is run on it, and OSX / MacOS is considered software.

 

[Samuelsan2001]

I run a 6 year old iMac, with the latest OS
In the past few week the spinning color thing has ofter keep spinning when I click on anything.
A few times the spinning stopped and all seemed frozen. I did a shut down by the button on the back and then rebooted. All worked well, but later the spinning ball continue to take a long time to activate what ever it was I clicked on.

Ideas as to what might be happening and/or how to fix?

If you still have the original hard drive in it it's probably that slowly fragmenting and dying, 6years is good service for a spinning hard drive.

Go into disk utility and do a disk repair and see how this goes, make sure you back up any info you can't lose and consider getting the hard drive replaced with an SSD.

 

[Silvestru Hosszu]

I have a similar issue with my iMac 27'' 2012 with 1tb fusion drive.
Everything disk related is very slow.
My configuration is i7 extreme, nvidia 680m and 32gb of ram