Getting tired of the 'Spinning wheel of Death'

regulus · 13 Mar 2010 at 10:45

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_wait_cursor

This is ruining my Mac experience, and I mean totally making me want to sell the Mac on Ebay and be done with it.

I looked around on the web and there is literally thousands of complaints regarding this. It happens at any times, even just typing up a simple post can render the Mac inoperable for up to 10 seconds. It happens after it comes off sleep, opening iTunes, Safari or any movie. Sometimes I see it happen, even if I'm not close to the keyboard.

I had the Mac back to the shop at least 5 times now and I'm guaranteed there is no hardware or software errors that would give lead to this. Apparently it's just 'one of those things mate, gotta get used to it'.

Any advice on how to fix or even minimise the 'spinning time' would be greatly appreciated.

I've even pulled out my old XP laptop and using that instead.

NickK · 13 Mar 2010 at 11:06

No I don't get a SPOD on my MBP or my Mini.

Usually it's IO waiting or something waiting until time out - such as waiting for a hard drive on it's way out. Have you checked the HD health, used DiskUtility to 'fix permissions' and used verify disc?

FreeStream · 13 Mar 2010 at 11:14

Something is wrong then if you get it constantly.

I only get it when a HD is on its way out.

Feek · 13 Mar 2010 at 11:17

The only time I'm ever aware of seeing it is in iTunes when I connect a device and all the syncing kicks in. What Mac do you have and how much memory?

regulus · 13 Mar 2010 at 12:36

4GB Two Core CPU at 2.4MHZ. 24' screen.

v0n · 13 Mar 2010 at 13:53

I get that for about 30 minutes after fresh boot up. It's really annoying because it is - as you said - completely random, you click on something and suddenly cursor starts "beachballing" and gradually everything goes into wait state, you can't launch anything, often switch between windows, then two minutes later everything just unlocks. It happens again and again, then just goes away - here I am sitting 6 days later without single "beachball" incident. But I know if I reboot to windows and back I'll have to go through the whole thing again. There is nothing in logs or console to explain why it happens or what the machine is doing.

I have five drives in my Mac Pro, three of which are NTFS with MacFuse and NTFS-3G, and two PC versions of ATI 4870 flashed to support EFI - my Mac Pro for example doesn't sleep and doesn't hibernate as well - it wakes up anywhere between 30 seconds and 2 hours after sending it to sleep/hibernate regardless of settings - so I don't complain because there is a lot of "dodgy" components to cause that sort of behavior during indexing, prefetching, optimizing or whatever the hell is OSX doing for an hour after boot up. I wish it did foxtrot oscar and go away, especially if I booted to do something urgent and all I get is beachballing all over the place, but hey - it's not like I'm going to reinstall it - my whole life is on it.

K1LLSW1TCH · 13 Mar 2010 at 13:57

I was having this very frequently just recently. It would happen whenever I tried opening applications, sometimes it would appear even though I wasn't doing anything or running any programs. I decided to format the HDD and have a fresh install of Leopard and it fixed the problem. I've not seen the pinwheel since.

tonyzero · 13 Mar 2010 at 17:10

i get it a bit but its because i have two external hard drive that spin down after a set time so sometime when i open a program i have to wait for the drives to spin up again.

J1234 · 13 Mar 2010 at 17:24

There's clearly something wrong with it if it's doing that a lot. Have you tried a complete re-install?

Dangerous Dave · 13 Mar 2010 at 18:30

My girlfriend's 13" MBP does this every so often, a clean install did not help it just returns in a couple of weeks. Doesn't really bother her but it drives me up the wall it can't be hardware related as it runs Windows fine. It is a bit ridiculous when Windows runs better than OS X on a Apple laptop.

FreeStream · 13 Mar 2010 at 19:43

v0n said:
I get that for about 30 minutes after fresh boot up. It's really annoying because it is - as you said - completely random, you click on something and suddenly cursor starts "beachballing" and gradually everything goes into wait state, you can't launch anything, often switch between windows, then two minutes later everything just unlocks. It happens again and again, then just goes away - here I am sitting 6 days later without single "beachball" incident. But I know if I reboot to windows and back I'll have to go through the whole thing again. There is nothing in logs or console to explain why it happens or what the machine is doing.

I have five drives in my Mac Pro, three of which are NTFS with MacFuse and NTFS-3G, and two PC versions of ATI 4870 flashed to support EFI - my Mac Pro for example doesn't sleep and doesn't hibernate as well - it wakes up anywhere between 30 seconds and 2 hours after sending it to sleep/hibernate regardless of settings - so I don't complain because there is a lot of "dodgy" components to cause that sort of behavior during indexing, prefetching, optimizing or whatever the hell is OSX doing for an hour after boot up. I wish it did foxtrot oscar and go away, especially if I booted to do something urgent and all I get is beachballing all over the place, but hey - it's not like I'm going to reinstall it - my whole life is on it.

4 Drives and 2 DVD drives in my Mac Pro.

I only get issues on the 4th Hard-disk which is either dying or just doesn't work with the X58 chipset in my MP very well... and even then it doesn't have any issues with beachballing...

My Mac Pro is up an running the second I turn it on, no pauses, no beachballing. Nothing...

Neither does my Sept 2007 MacBook Pro...

Sorry but something is wrong with either your disks, install or software...

Rameses · 13 Mar 2010 at 22:48

Have any of you with problems have installed Flash Beta 10.1?

Not to jump on the whole bandwagon with Flash, but I recently had extremely bad delays after upgrading Safari to 4.0.5, having got rid of it and now back on 10 it appears to have cleared the issue.

If not, then again it could be a program you have that is causing the issue, because it can happen like this.

I'd suggest a complete flat install, save what you need and have done with it.

I'd bet if you did, it would solve the issue!

hyper_piper45 · 14 Mar 2010 at 08:24

Dangerous Dave said:
My girlfriend's 13" MBP does this every so often, a clean install did not help it just returns in a couple of weeks. Doesn't really bother her but it drives me up the wall it can't be hardware related as it runs Windows fine. It is a bit ridiculous when Windows runs better than OS X on a Apple laptop.

You GF could be experiencing THIS problem.

Greyhound · 14 Mar 2010 at 10:22

I only get this issue very rarely - I think it's to do with IO as it seems to only when I have vmware fusion open and running a VM on my system disk. If you're running any VMs try putting them onto an external drive.

Logsi · 14 Mar 2010 at 10:24

I get the spinning wheel but only when loading programs. I thought it was the norm. It only happens for at most a second when loading a big iTunes library. Come to think of it, it's only iTunes it happens with i think.

The hard drive could be very slow. You tried defragging with iDefrag, Clean cache out with CleanMyMac and used onyx and run every maintenance utility?

Also, my mother MBP used to do t quite a bit. I did all of the above and it sorted it i think. Also, are you on Snow Leopard or Leopard and is it up to date? Wasn't there a firmware update that fixed problems with the hard drive protection systems.

Dangerous Dave · 14 Mar 2010 at 12:38

hyper_piper45 said:
You GF could be experiencing THIS problem.

Thanks for that link it does sound very similair I was going to put a SSD in it to see if that helps but I may try downgrading the firmware. It still has the stock 250gig drive in where most people seem to have problems when they change the drive but worth a try.

hyper_piper45 · 14 Mar 2010 at 14:44

Dangerous Dave said:
Thanks for that link it does sound very similair I was going to put a SSD in it to see if that helps but I may try downgrading the firmware. It still has the stock 250gig drive in where most people seem to have problems when they change the drive but worth a try.

I had problems using the stock drive when i updated to 1.7. Since I have rolled it back i'm not experiencing any problems anymore.

However it is very annoying. If I wanted to upgrade to an SSD I would not be able to realise its full potential as I would have to stick with sata 1 speeds

Rooky007 · 14 Mar 2010 at 15:13

Logsi said:
I get the spinning wheel but only when loading programs. I thought it was the norm. It only happens for at most a second when loading a big iTunes library. Come to think of it, it's only iTunes it happens with i think.

The hard drive could be very slow. You tried defragging with iDefrag, Clean cache out with CleanMyMac and used onyx and run every maintenance utility?

Also, my mother MBP used to do t quite a bit. I did all of the above and it sorted it i think. Also, are you on Snow Leopard or Leopard and is it up to date? Wasn't there a firmware update that fixed problems with the hard drive protection systems.

Is CleanMyMac any good as I have been told it quite good but I cant justify paying for it whilst onyX is free but a few people have said CleanMyMac is better???

Feek · 14 Mar 2010 at 15:27

CleanMyMac can remove stuff like languages and remove unwanted code from universal binaries which is probably why its payware. OnyX does the system caches and regular cleanups and is all you need.

Rooky007 · 14 Mar 2010 at 15:30

Thanks think I stick with OnyX