Spinning Beach Balls

Most likely. See http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/sbbod.html and consider reinstalling Snow Leopard.

Use disk utility to repair permissions and verify your HD. If issue persists, reinstall SL.

tried to re-install mine 5 times. eventually had to wipe the hard drive and start over with leopard.

robertmccoy wrote:
Thanks - I think I will reinstall the OS -- my system is so light and I don't run any complicated graphics that would cause the OS to pause --

If I were you, I'd first check to see if your machine is covered by the problems in this thread:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2054387&start=960&tstart=0

There's a solution in there as well:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2054387&start=1005&tstart=0

Good luck.

Same issues here with the freeze/beach balls. I can barely type this as it hangs up every 30 seconds or so. It happens in all applications and the finder. The issue started a few months back (with an update I suspect), and I have since installed SL with negative results.

I have repaired permissions and the disk from the SL install disk and checked the hardware with the original system disks: all with no problems reported. Activity Monitor shows 27 GB free space on the HD, more than half the memory available and CPU minimal activity.

Not sure where to head from here, aside from installing SL from a clean disk...

Did you reinstall 10.6 before installing the update? If not, the problem probably migrated. Reinstall 10.6 and see if that fixes things.

I beta-tested the cat, so it's been running here since last October, with few if any issues, and the SPOD isn't one of them.

Hi Everyone,

All I got after upgrading to Snow Leopard from Tiger, was the stupid spinning beach ball - for everything i did. Open a window, spinning beach ball, open a file, spinning beach ball, write something, spinning beach ball....etc. I was really freaking out. My system is really powerful, i never get the beach ball even though i work on really large files.

Needless to say, I wasted 4 whole days troubleshooting, reading everything online about the problem, etc. Until today. I finally talked to an apple specialist who knew what to do.

I know this is not a real solution to the problem. More of a work-a-round...but i was fed up and it worked for me.

All you have to do is CREATE A NEW USER. Yes, that simple. Much easier than wiping your computer and doing a clean install which really has no guarantee to work anyways.

I really hope this helps people out with this problem. I couldn't be more relieved.

But then what about all of the files/preferences/etc I have in my existing (crashing) account?

Here is something:

In another thread on slows I chimed in on, creating another User was going to be my next step but I read where external devices could cause slows & spinning beachballs. So I disconnected my external TM hard drive and bingo!! No more slows and no more spinning beachballs! It was like magic! I could navigate in browsers, check out files in Finder, run apps galore and no beachballs nor slowdowns!!

The read also said to add each device one at a time so SL would recognise it and 'install fresh' as a new device. That worked and now things are 100%!!

I had the same problem, and could check that even during the spinning beach ball, I was able to launch dashboard. In the istat nano widget, I could check that "WindowServer" was using a large part of the CPU.
Thanks to it, I found the following advice on another web site, that solved the issue.
Warning, I'm french, using a french version of Mac OS X, so I cannot guarantee the exact english translation of it:

*In the Finder, choose the "presentation option" menu, and uncheck the second line " Use file preview as icon".*

Here it is for me, after that no more beach ball.
Hope it helps.