Swirling rainbow??

Check The Spinning Beach Ball of Death.

If the spinning beach ball continues for a minute or so, an app is probably frozen. The ball will go away when the mouse isn't over the frozen app's space (usually a window.) If that happens, and you're sure that the app is frozen, and you don't have important saved work that you could lose, hold down the Command and Option keys (apple and option), then click the escape key. That will bring up the force quit window, which lets you quit the unresponsive app.
-Michael

Hi lilrit

SBOD (the spinning beachball of death) normally appears, either when your Mac has more to do than it can cope with, or it is choking on some process. If you are seeing a great deal of it on a shiny new G5 then something is wrong. On the other hand, on my almost 4 year's old Powerbook with only 256MB RAM and with 10 apps running it is quite normal.

What third party software have you installed? You might have something incompatible with Tiger like Virex, for example. If you haven't installed any third party applications yet, and you have very few files I would back up your files and try a clean install of Tiger.

Matthew Whiting

Just click on the program icon you are using at the bottom for a "Force Quit". I did that the other day on a video project I had not saved. Amazingly, I found the preedited segments in "View Trash", so check there to see if you can recover any of the material you thought you lost completely.

Thanks, lilrit —

— for calling it a " "swirling rainbow."

Nice turn of a phrase, that. "Kaleidoscopic lollipop" "mystic pizza" or even "Day-Glo beachball" would be fine with me . . .

But SBBOD, SBOD, spinning beach_ball_ofdeath connote something waay too morbid for my sensibilities.

Like a tendency to obsess over lurid "news" on TV or an accident on the highway. When there's a lot else that's real — but subtle or not amenable to sound-bites or "overkill" in any form.

Not knowing the etymology of the term, seems as if Dr. Smoke may've coined it. I much prefer his topic sentence's " please wait progress indicator" phrasing — but it's less exciting, I suppose. Some folks here in Apple Discussions use this pejorative too freely, methinks. When the unresponsiveness is really interminable, it may be serious. When it's not, no sense obsessing over minutae.

Yes, lilrit, there's a point in here somewhere:

as Michael said and matthew implied, this "swirling rainbow" simply indicates that something is being " unresponsive" at the moment. Patience is often all that's needed — and you can usually switch to another application in the meantime. Your new "G5" may simply be doing something temporarily that may or may not actually matter to you at all. If the appearance of the "swirling rainbow" becomes very prolonged &/or chronic — there may be something worth exploring further, using the link that's been provided above or others we can provide when you need 'em.

When and if help is needed. Sometimes it's just Spotlight indexing, the Mac "looking-up" something that's a little hard to access, a reallhy minor error that an application needs to correct, etc.

In fact, brand new Macs (or those with newly installed OS X versions) may take a while for Spotlight to index — causing the behavior you've described. If you launch Activity Monitor ( path: /Applications/Utilities/) and see something in red typeface, please post back and folks can help you to decipher what's being unresponsive.

I just don't want you to feel alarmed — or force-quit applications — unnecessarily. OK?

Best to you — and here's hoping you love your new Mac!
Dean