I keep getting a spinning color wheel when I start safari or mail and it holds up my iMac for several minutes. At times I need to do a hard reset as it freezes e everything ... I'm stumped! Software is up to date ... Help!
iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.8)
Click the Apple on your menu bar and select About This Mac, tell us what Processor and how much RAM you have...?
Then control (right) click on your Macintosh HD and select Get Info, tell us what the Capacity: Available: and Used: GB numbers are...?
Ok ... Here you go ...
2.66 ghz intel core 2 duo
2 gb 800 MHz ddr2 sdram
Capacity 319.73 gb
Available 207.84 gb
OK, plenty of free HD space.
You should be fine with 2GB of RAM in 10.6. Unless you have a lot of other App's (processes) open that are using all the free RAM, while you are trying to opening Safari or Mail..?
To check your RAM usage, open your Activity Monitor and check to see how much free RAM is there before and after opening Safari or Mail.
see > Using Activity Monitor to read System Memory and determine how much RAM is being used
If you have a lot of App's open or set to open at Log-in, you may need to cut back on the number of App's that are running at the same time or upgrade your RAM.
OK ...
before opening mail or safari
Free 1.30 GB; Wired: 268.6 mb: Active 392.2 mb; inactive 58.0 mb; used 717.9 mb
opened mail (which is set up for my comcast account, and only recently has been this crazy) .. first off, it showed "not responding" and took 12 minutes to fully load new messages and get rid of the spinning ball
Free 1.19 gb; wired 276.4 mb; active 473.6 mb; inactive 76.2 mb; used 826.3 mb
Then opened Safari
free 1.08 gb, wired 282.2 mb; active 576.6 mb; inactive 76.5 mb; used 936.9 mb
As I'm typing this:
Free 1,017.5 mb; wired 282.1 mb; active 651.4 mb; inactive 98.6 mb; used 1.01 GB
I hope this makes more sense to you than it does to me 🙂 ... thanks so far!
RAM usage looks OK..
The problem seems to be with Mail, the other problem is that I do not use the Mail App in OS X.
Because I'm not sure exactlly where to start or how to troubleshoot Mail problems, I'm going to call for reinforcements.
that would be awesome ... thx!
michelle --
You said
and only recently has been this crazy)
If you could think really hard to find out what changes you have made to your system before it started going crazy. For example, have you added a bunch of free fonts, or loaded on Office? Added on a major security app?
Maybe check your downloads to see what's new.
John has suggested rebuilding the Mail mailboxes.Once Mail is open, go to: Mailbox on the menu bar and select Rebuild.
As for Safari, is it opening and working if you open it before Mail and what if any Extensions are you using?
bee ... nothing really. I run the software updates and download photos from my camera into IPhoto, but nothing strange is showing in my downloads. My kids tend to surf YouTube, but I emptied the cache and did a restart. The only other thing is when I hard restart due to the BB, my garmen maps keep popping up to update my GPS (which I haven't done yet) ... I only ran a security update to Snow Leopard last night ... and this has been happening the past couple of weeks. 😟
den.thed ... if I recall, Safari seems to open OK ... stalls a bit, I'll have to recheck this (I'm east coast, so it's creeping on 11 pm) and get back to you. I'm not sure what extensions are actually - so fill me in, or I'm just not using any hehe. ... and I just went into panic mode as I hit rebuild and the mail in my inbox all went blank ... so I'll be rebooting mail here in the near future ... i've been opening mail first since it takes so dang long!
den.thed wrote:
John has suggested rebuilding the Mail mailboxes.Once Mail is open, go to: Mailbox on the menu bar and select Rebuild.
As for Safari, is it opening and working if you open it before Mail and what if any Extensions are you using?
OK ... so I just restarted and opened Safari first ... no spinning ball. And I opened mail after hitting the rebuild, well, I'm missing messages from Dec. 24 - now, but it opened right away. Most messages are FB feeds, so it's not like I've lost anything important. So, initial thoughts ... John was a tremendous help, BUT, we shall see what happens when I try to open mail again ... and I'll try it first with the next restart or wake up ... so appreiciate the walk-thru on all of this!
Try Safari and some other App's first thing in the morning to make sure that they are all OK...
Then we can work on sorting out the Mail problem.
So far, so good!!! No spinning bb this AM and I have several windows opened and it was working like a charm (fingers crossed).
Still missing those few days of mail since the rebuild of the mailbox last night ... but thanks so much!!!!!! You saved me a trip to the apple store!
Your welcome!
Can you see and get to those missing days on your Internet Service Provider's Server..?
I can get them from my ISP's site!
I was going crazy over this, thanks a million and Happy New Year!
I keep getting a spinning color wheel when I start safari or mail and it holds up my iMac for several minutes. At times I need to do a hard reset as it freezes e everything ... I'm stumped! Software is up to date ... Help!
