Snow Leopard = Spinning Beach Ball?

HI,

This link is for 10.5 but the suggestions work in 10.6 also.

Mac OS X 10.5: What you can do if Safari quits unexpectedly







Carolyn 🙂

Safari actually is working fine for me. Firefox is a different story...

I found that you need to delete both Adobe Flash and Shockwave from your system. Both plug-ins are incompatible with OS 10.6.

Adobe says Flash will work but I've had no luck. Deleted and reinstalled at least 3x. Shockwave won't even install on 10.6.

Adobe needs to get with the program.

Since installing Snow Leopard, I'm getting the dreaded beach ball all the time. Waking up the laptop is now a game of chance: will I get my work back or just a black screen and the beach ball of death? Half the time I now have to reboot the computer and hope my word processor has saved what I was working on. iPhoto is beach ball heaven. I have a Macbook 5.1 with a 2Ghz processor and 2GB of memory. What gives? Is a Snow Leopard fix coming for this? Does the operating system make more demands on the system?

It sounds like you have a corrupted cache and/or cookie....do you know how to clean them out properly?

I have to say that I'm starting to be angry about all this. I have a Macbook Pro Unibody 2.53 Mhz with 4GB.

Everything was fine. Then I bought Snow Leopard ...

Was this software even tested in the new macbooks?

The system stalls (I get this spinning beach ball) all the time with any app (Apple Mail, Firefox, Safari, System Profile you name it).

This even thought the Activity Monitor says that the system no under any stress.

I don't know why, but I suspect it may have something to do with drivers. But what a heck, isn't the hardware specifications defined and built by Apple.

Can someone post what info is needed to trace the problem?

I have my laptop connected to the company Active Directory, that is the only idiosyncrasy I can think of.

Best regards,

Nuno
PS: I don't want support, I want a OS that works as advertised in my latest model Mac Book Pro. Heck, the Windows 7 installed in BootCamp works better then Snow Leopard.

I totally agree with you ever since I upgrade to snow leopard I've found myself screaming *** at Safari... I'll have my computer sleeping during the night with a few safari windows open when I wake it from sleep and try to continue using safari every TAB causes a beach ball this is UNACCEPTABLE. I actually started using Camino again just because it works. It's a no frills browser that just lets me surf the web. I tried checking the console nothing really out of the ordinary.

For now the problem has gone. I uninstalled and installed flash play following this thread procedure:

http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=10183055

Cheers.

Just a note. In my case the machine always booted properly with not beach ball spins.

The spins happened already in session and working with apps. All I need to have is the Mail App running and hidden for the beach ball to spin. I guess Apple Mail is somewhat linked with Safari is it would one way or another get be affected.

Tran

Check with FontBook. Safari and other apps plus the new SL fonts and how fonts are handled.

Go into ~/Library/Caches/MetaData and empty that folder out again too.

Try going here:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=778819

Follow iMerlins directions. It worked for me.

Good luck.

For whats it worth, I was getting random beach balls on a clean install of 10.6 as well (brand new Macbook Pro 13") - sometimes for up to 30 seconds+ at a time. There was no obvious process taking up cycles in Activity Monitor. I tried everything in this thread and the Macrumors.com thread as well, nothing helped. Finally looked in the console logs right after it happened once and noticed a message about SMS (sudden motion sensor).

I manually disabled SMS via the terminal ( http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1934)
Haven't seen an extended beach ball yet. Seems the Macbook thought it was in frefall randomly or something so was kicking in the SMS... at least I think that's what was going on ;(