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Mac pauses all the time, spinning ball.

I am a long time Mac user and I am stumped. Seems like lately the Mac is always pausing for several seconds and displaying the spinning ball. Its very frustrating and makes it impossible to get any work done. I've tried emptying all the caches, repairing permissions, fixing the directory tree, etc. I have 4GB of RAM and about 55GB of free disk space. No repair I do seems to fix the constant pausing. Doesn't matter what app I am in. Occurs most when switching apps and when typing. Activity monitor shows huge spikes in disk activity. CPU usage is low, nothing seems to be hogging CPU or RAM.

I am starting to wonder if the harddrive is dying.

Any ideas? I'd hate to buy a new machine when this machine should run fine (It was fine about 6 mos ago) Should I drop back to 10.4.11?

Thanks.

MacBook Pro Intel Core Duo 2.33ghz, Mac OS X (10.6.4), iPhone, Mac mini Core Duo, Mac mini G4, G3 iBook, Cube

Posted on Sep 14, 2010 12:59 AM

22 replies

Sep 15, 2010 7:45 AM in response to Andres Blasco

hehe told ya 🙂

glad you got that sorted . .

Sep 16, 2010 2:26 AM in response to Murat Lahur

Yeah. And thanks, btw, for your comments. It irritates me tho that such a young HD will die that quick... Thank God I am this lazy so I still have the vast majority of my data in my older laptop and the external HD I have been using for a bit over a year. Losing very few photos and videos and about 7 records I had downloaded -and not backed up- from iTunes.

What do you guys recommend for instant back up so that I don't go thru this in the future?

...one learns it sooner or later...

Cheers!

Sep 16, 2010 3:16 AM in response to Andres Blasco

Time capsule ?? it is one heck of a seamlessly integrated instant fully automated hassle free back up system ..

I would recommend

Pondini

Level 8

38,863 points

Sep 16, 2010 9:40 AM in response to Andres Blasco

A Time Capsule is fine if you also need a wireless router.

If you also have a desktop Mac, you can back up with Time Machine over your network to a "shared" disk on the desktop Mac.

It's less convenient, but Time Machine (and other backup apps) will also back up to an external USB or FireWire drive. That's much faster, and somewhat more reliable, than a network backup.

KXsig

Level 2

310 points

Sep 17, 2010 4:15 PM in response to Andres Blasco

Hi A,

AppleCare covers you worldwide. When you have the hang behavior do you take a look at your Console log files to see if there are any messages suggesting a narrow point to issue? And also, how long have you already waited on hang until power machine down?

Good luck.

Message was edited by: KXsig

Sep 17, 2010 5:51 PM in response to Murat Lahur

Thanks - yep that app says the disk is failing. I am all good with a time capsule backup.

Sep 17, 2010 5:53 PM in response to Terence Curtis

Cool .. I'm glad to be of help if I could ..

Mac pauses all the time, spinning ball.