The last few days my 2013 Macbook Air has been really slow and i've been getting the rainbow wheel a lot. In the storage tab in about this mac, it says I have 93 gigs of 128 free but in disk utility is says i have only 12 megabytes free. If thats whats slowing it down how do I free that space? I also have the latest software. Thanks.
MacBook Air, OS X Yosemite (10.10.1)
Go step by step and check.
1. Start up in Safe Mode.
http://support.apple.com/kb/PH11212
2. Backup your computer.
3. Empty Trash.
http://support.apple.com/kb/PH13806
4. Disk space / Time Machine / Local Snapshots
Local backups
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4878
5. Re-index Macintosh HD.
This will take a while. Wait until it is finished.
System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht2409
6.Try OmniDiskSweeper. This will show the storage size details of the items.
https://www.omnigroup.com/more
Select Macintosh HD and click “Sweep Selected Drive” at the bottom.
Be careful. Delete only the files that can be safely deleted. If you are not sure about any file, don’t touch it.
If this doesn’t help, run EtreCheck and post the report here please.
EtreCheck: https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-6173
In the storage tab in about this mac, it says I have 93 gigs of 128 free but in disk utility is says i have only 12 megabytes free.
Normal.
When you see a beachball cursor or the slowness is especially bad, note the exact time: hour, minute, second.
These instructions must be carried out as an administrator. If you have only one user account, you are the administrator.
Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad and start typing the name.
The title of the Console window should be All Messages. If it isn't, select
SYSTEM LOG QUERIES ▹ All Messages
from the log list on the left. If you don't see that list, select
View ▹ Show Log List
from the menu bar at the top of the screen.
Each message in the log begins with the date and time when it was entered. Scroll back to the time you noted above.
Select the messages entered from then until the end of the episode, or until they start to repeat, whichever comes first.
Copy the messages to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Paste into a reply to this message by pressing command-V.
The log contains a vast amount of information, almost all of it useless for solving any particular problem. When posting a log extract, be selective. A few dozen lines are almost always more than enough.
Please don't indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.
Please don't post screenshots of log messages—post the text.
Some private information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.
When you post the log extract, you might see an error message on the web page: "You have included content in your post that is not permitted," or "The message contains invalid characters." That's a bug in the forum software. Please post the text on Pastebin, then post a link here to the page you created.
How do I Remove the rainbow wheel?
