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User profile for user: Wendy Asea
Wendy Asea
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Question: spinning beach ball

I have an iMac, late 2012, running El Capitan 10.11.6. I've been having a LOT of trouble lately with a huge time lag every time I click on anything...the dreaded beach ball. I'm talking 3 or 4 or more minutes of lag every time I click anything. I was getting messages about my start up disk being full, so I just bought a WD Passport and moved a lot of files onto that to free up space. I now have 120 GB free on my hard drive (but it took me nearly 5 minutes for my "about this Mac" window to open to check that! I can literally click on my daily crossword puzzle page but end up printing it off my phone and finishing the puzzle by the time the screens load and it prints off my desktop! I've run disk first aid, but I don't know what else to try. Any suggestions or is this computer just getting old?

iMac 21.5″, OS X 10.11

Posted on Jun 8, 2020 6:54 AM

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User profile for user: HWTech
HWTech
User level: Level 7
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Answer:
Answer:

Run the Apple Diagnostics.


Also run EtreCheck and post the report here using the "Additional Text" icon which looks like a piece of paper.

Posted on Jun 8, 2020 11:14 AM

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User profile for user: Wendy Asea
Wendy Asea
User level: Level 1
(19 points)
Apple MusicSpeciality level out of ten: 0

Jun 9, 2020 6:29 AM in response to HWTech In response to HWTech

I did this but it didn’t make a difference. Because of its age I had to run the Apple Hardware test and even though I ran both the short and the extended tests, it didn’t show a problem. The computer keeps getting stuck on the loading bar as well and when it does finally load after a few tries it sometimes won’t load my desktop after I sign in. Anything else I can try?

Jun 9, 2020 6:29 AM

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User profile for user: BDAqua
BDAqua
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Jun 9, 2020 7:47 AM in response to Wendy Asea In response to Wendy Asea

If you cangetit to run & run long enough...


EtreCheck is a simple little app to display the important details of your system configuration and allow you to copy that information to the Clipboard. It is meant to be used with Apple Support Communities to help people help you with your Mac.

https://www.etrecheck.com/


Pastebin is a good place to paste the whole report if you capture the URL while there…

https://pastebin.com/

Jun 9, 2020 7:47 AM

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User profile for user: HWTech
HWTech
User level: Level 7
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Jun 9, 2020 8:54 AM in response to Wendy Asea In response to Wendy Asea

Try booting into Safe Mode. If this works try running EtreCheck.


It is really sounding like your internal hard drive is failing though.


You can check the health of the drive by creating a bootable Knoppix Linux USB drive using Etcher (Mac/Windows/Linux). Option Boot the USB drive and select the orange icon labeled "EFI". While Knoppix is booting the computer may appear to be frozen on the boot picker menu so give Knoppix lots of time to boot.


When Knoppix finishes booting to the desktop click on the "Start" menu icon in the lower left corner of the Taskbar and navigate the menus to "System Tools ---> GSmartControl". Within the GSmartControl app double-click on the iMac's hard drive to access the drive's health information. Post the complete report here.


If Knoppix doesn't boot to a desktop, but stops at a command prompt, then let me know & I can provide other instructions for retrieving the health information.

Jun 9, 2020 8:54 AM

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User profile for user: Wendy Asea

Question: spinning beach ball