Mac spinning pizza wheel O' death

affiliatearmy

affiliatearmy

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May 22, 2008
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Laguna Beach,CA USA
Guys if anyone can help I'm buying beer-

SOO sick of my Mac's getting the spinning wheel of death...I've cleared cache and temp et al, nothing running that is hog or anything..just seems when Mac's get around 2-3 years old with heavy use they start to die.
And they don't give you OS discs so reuploaded the OS isn't exactly easy-

Thoughts?

Thanks in advance-
 


ya i usually just clean install once a year an half i noticed. MUch better than windows in my experience.

Osx lion you are using? i have osx lion, snowleopard and leopard in dmg if you need.
 
I'd run some deduper, a full clean using something like Clean My Mac, then run through some shit on Onyx and fix permissions and what not. See how that goes.

If not, check what version you're running, run Time Machine to a backup, get a copy of Snow Leopard or Leopard (depending on what you run) from eBay, then clean install, upgrade to same OS version as the backup, then migrate your Time Machine backup so you have all your programs, files and settings on the new install.
 
I took it to the Apple store and they changed the Hard Disk.

We also have an old white macbook. I have never seen the spinning wheel on that, and it has lesser RAM and less of everything than my new Pro.
 
got some good tricks, too many to list all at once buy I'll start with a few, and a simple search on google on any of these topics will give you clear cut instuctions.

1. Clear your system cache - it's in system folder...cache i believe.

2. clear your user cache - it's in user's - library - cache - or something like that

3. find activity monitor - it's in your system applications or something, an put it in your dock bar. This is similar to the good 'ol "task manager" for windows. Everytime your comp is running slow open Activity Monitor, select view all processes and see what's hogging all your CPU or Virtual Memory.

4. Get rid of all the extra files on your machine. This is a big one and will make a HUGE difference. Macs work differently than PC's. They search faster, and run way better. But everytime you do ANYTHING on your machine it has to scan through your hard drive. Chances are if it's running slow, that you have your hard drive filled almost to capacity. If you need to go buy an external hard drive and run some files off of that. Lacie makes great hard drives, or even just a cheap western digital.

5. Clear up any extra files on your desktop, they hog memory. Create a folder on your desktop called Desktop and put all your desktop files in the desktop folder on your desktop. Get it?

There are a lot of other things you can do, but these are the main things. Fuck all that noise about reinstalling OSX, just clean up your machine. I run DAW's with shitloads of plugins, Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, and a bunch of other stuff on 2 dif Macs that are both over 4 years old and what I listed above is pretty much all I ever do to keep em running smooth.
 
For how much press they get, Apple products sure are crap. They'd be great if they weren't ripe with so many problems and not break down so easily. Although the "pinwheel of death" could be due to a variety of things, and not just your Mac sucking.
 
Spiderweb said:
For how much press they get, Microsoft products sure are crap. They'd be great if they weren't ripe with so many problems and not break down so easily. Although the "blue screen of death" could be due to a variety of things, and not just your OS sucking.
Click to expand...

Fixed it for ya
 
jellyfish said:
Fixed it for ya
Click to expand...

Take mac and place directly in toilet. Then buy a PC with Win 7... profit! Really Win 7 is the best version of Windows yet. Probably the first time ever I haven't had to wipe my system after like 6 months. Been running it at least a year and a half without issue.
 
Rage9 said:
Take mac and place directly in toilet. Then buy a PC with Win 7... profit! Really Win 7 is the best version of Windows yet. Probably the first time ever I haven't had to wipe my system after like 6 months. Been running it at least a year and a half without issue.
Click to expand...

Actually now that you mention it, I have been running Win 7 for 2 years now no problems AND AND I upgraded from Home Premium to Ultimate then back down to Professional and not once did I wipe.

However sounds like in the OP's case, I think he should just wipe and re-install.
 
Rage9 said:
Take mac and place directly in toilet. Then buy a PC with Win 7... profit! Really Win 7 is the best version of Windows yet. Probably the first time ever I haven't had to wipe my system after like 6 months. Been running it at least a year and a half without issue.
Click to expand...

lrn2terminal
 
If not, check what version you're running, run Time Machine to a backup, get a copy of Snow Leopard or Leopard (depending on what you run) from eBay, then clean install, upgrade to same OS version as the backup.
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I spent the morning on a Mac in my class at the university. I wasted half the darned class waiting for that spin to stop spinning. I know your frustration. I couldn't wait to get home and work on my PC.
 
Utilities -> Disk Utility -> Select Hard Drive -> Repair Permissions. That pretty much solves my weird issues.
 
affiliatearmy said:
Guys if anyone can help I'm buying beer-

SOO sick of my Mac's getting the spinning wheel of death...I've cleared cache and temp et al, nothing running that is hog or anything..just seems when Mac's get around 2-3 years old with heavy use they start to die.
And they don't give you OS discs so reuploaded the OS isn't exactly easy-

Thoughts?

Thanks in advance-
Click to expand...

You should have an OS disk, they stopped with Lion, but they have a recovery partition on those.

Download and run macjanitor.

In disk utilities run repair permissions, until it stops fixing things or you feel like shooting yourself in the head, whichever comes first.

If you find or get an OS disk boot from it and run disk first aid.

You could try DiskWarior (pay), but I've never had to use it.

You can disable spotlight indexing on external drives by goint to System Preferences -> Spotlight -> Privacy, and drag your external drive to the list. This also works for folders you want to prevent indexing of.

Go through your preferences folder and removed unneeded prefs.

Make sure stuff like bluetooth, internet sharing, speech recognition are off if you don't use them.

Remove unused dashboard widgets.

You could try deleting your spotlight index and have it rebuilt, this could take a long time. In terminal sudo mdutil -E /

I remember something about having Spotlight not index MS Office cache or something, but don't recall. You could look into that.

2-3 years on a Mac is not an issue. I've got one macbook 5 years old running fine on original install and upgrade to snow, no clean install and an older g5 running for longer than that.

Create another user on the machine and see if the same problem occurs with that account, if not move your files over to it.

If all else fails you can look here thexlab.com
 
Not that your still reading this thread but since someone bumped it here I am. And you sill owe me beer. =) In addition to what I posted previously do this:

Go to HD - "username" - Library - Safari - Local Storage and delete all that shit, it slows Safari down like a MF and you don't need it.

Broland said:
got some good tricks, too many to list all at once buy I'll start with a few, and a simple search on google on any of these topics will give you clear cut instuctions.

1. Clear your system cache - it's in system folder...cache i believe.

2. clear your user cache - it's in user's - library - cache - or something like that

3. find activity monitor - it's in your system applications or something, an put it in your dock bar. This is similar to the good 'ol "task manager" for windows. Everytime your comp is running slow open Activity Monitor, select view all processes and see what's hogging all your CPU or Virtual Memory.

4. Get rid of all the extra files on your machine. This is a big one and will make a HUGE difference. Macs work differently than PC's. They search faster, and run way better. But everytime you do ANYTHING on your machine it has to scan through your hard drive. Chances are if it's running slow, that you have your hard drive filled almost to capacity. If you need to go buy an external hard drive and run some files off of that. Lacie makes great hard drives, or even just a cheap western digital.

5. Clear up any extra files on your desktop, they hog memory. Create a folder on your desktop called Desktop and put all your desktop files in the desktop folder on your desktop. Get it?

There are a lot of other things you can do, but these are the main things. Fuck all that noise about reinstalling OSX, just clean up your machine. I run DAW's with shitloads of plugins, Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, and a bunch of other stuff on 2 dif Macs that are both over 4 years old and what I listed above is pretty much all I ever do to keep em running smooth.
Click to expand...
 
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