Spinning beach balls

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Level 1

37 points

Spinning beach balls

I own a Mini, 2014 using Sierra 10.12.6. My reason for this OS is that I use Adobe After Effects CS4 daily to create family videos and photos (Can't afford Adobe's monthly payment plan).

Lately it has been giving me the beach ball on Safari, Mail and CS4. Also, no longer able to back up to my external 1tb OWC mercury elite pro with a firewire 800 cable that has a thunderbolt adapter to the mini. It powers up, then dies down. The drive is good but I think the external power supply is the problem. This is the second power supply. The first one did the same thing. Recently, I have been deleting cache and cookies from Sierra before closing down the mini.

My question. Would reinstalling the OS (I have the .dmg) correct the beach ball situation? Would moving up to High Sierra or higher still allow me to use CS4? Does deleting cache and cookies have anything to do with this?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts and suggestions.

Mac mini, macOS 10.12

Posted on Aug 3, 2022 7:42 AM

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Answer 1

HWTech

Level 9

68,708 points

Aug 3, 2022 1:42 PM in response to novanut

If you have a bad power supply, then that could also be the source of the spinning wheels.

Try running the Apple Diagnostics to see if any hardware issues are detected. However, the diagnostics don't detect most drive failures. To check the health of the drive run DriveDx and post the complete text report here using the "Additional Text" icon which looks like a piece of paper. If you have a Fusion Drive setup, then post the report for both the SSD & HD.

To look for possible software issues run EtreCheck and post the report here using the "Additional Text" icon which looks like a piece of paper. You can try booting into Safe Mode to see if that helps as that will disable third party software from automatically launching during boot and login.

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Spinning beach balls

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