Over the past several weeks I seem to have longer and longer waits. Does one need to clean up the hardrive? I was under the impression that OS X is much different in this respect compared to Windows.
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.5)
Ah, suedog, I see you have found the spinning wheel of wonder. do you have a backup solution for your macbook pro. That might be a good idea as hard drives do fail eventually. As for cleaning up the hard drive
I can't say I've ever really heard of that, but I've never heard of a lot of things. Don't get MacKeeper or anything like that-waste of your time and $. You might want to consider adding more memory to your Macbook Pro, as you are using Lion. try also using Disk Utility and verifying& repairing permissions. Might be worth a try
hope this helps a little bit
JB
What you are seeing is what we call the "technicolor beachball" and it is frequently associated with hard drive issues.
First, you don't need any software beyond Mac OS (possible exception: DiskWarrior from Alsoft) to keep your system in good shape. But you do have to do a bit of maintenance from time to time.
Simply doing a "cold start-up" helps the computer because MacOS X does file checks at start-up.
Simply looking at the "xxxGB available" at the bottom of a Finder window MacOS X 10.6 and earlier) or doing a Get Info (⌘+i) on the HDD will tell you where you stand. A system drive should only be 50-60% full for best performance. Sata drives should have 15-20% free. Download free OmniDiskSweeper for Mac 1.8
to help you see what's on your drives.
Periodically, repairing permissions can help keep things running proberly. About Disk Utility's Repair Disk Permissions feature
There's more, but this is a good start.
Colored rotating disk wait state (OS X 10.7.5)
