How do I do a general cleanup to eliminate the constant twirling of the rainbow wheel? Appears for an excessive amount of time when moving between programs.
MacBook Pro, OS X El Capitan (10.11.2)
If you see any offers of programs to 'cleanup, clean up, Mac cleaner, clean my Mac or the like, do not download even if it is a free offer. They will almost always turn out to be scams or malware or worse.
Take a look at this download, run it and publish the results here. It may not solve your immediate problem but it will likely help us establish what it is.
Mac OSX does a rather nice job of keeping itself clean. Have you restarted your computer recently? That performs some disk cleanup for you.
Do any of the following questions apply to your MacBook Pro?:
1) Are you running any anti-virus/internet security applications?
2) Are you running any "cleaning/tune-up/optimization" applications?
3) Any peer-to-peer or torrent downloading software?
4) Any third-party disk backup software that came bundled with an external hard drive?
5) Any online backup scheme other than iCloud (Carbonite; GoogleDrive; MS One Drive)?
6) Did your financial institution ask you to install Trusteer EndPoint Protection (also known as Trusteer Rapport)?
Any one of them can slow a Mac.
We also need to know more about your MacBook Pro. First, which of the many MBP variants is it? If you do "About this Mac" from your Apple menu you will get this:
See the line I've indicated with a red arrow? What does that line read when you do About this Mac on your computer? Also How much RAM is installed (from the same window)?
How much free space is on your hard drive? Highlight your hard drive and then press the space bar to get this:
The more details you post (except for your serial number--DO NOT post your serial number for security reasons) the better we are able to get you through this
Have resisted the urge to try those "clean-up programs". Still have AppleCare for another 30 days-guess I can try that; however, my experience on previous machines with that hasn't proven to work very well-only temporary relief. Going to give my MacBook to my granddaughter for her BD, but don"t want to give her a problem to deal with.
Use your Apple Care. That's what you paid for. A repair within the Apple Care service period may go over the end date but it will still be valid until the repair is completed.
MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid 2012), 4 GB 1600 MHz DDr3/403.44 GB free of 498.88 GB
A significant contributor to seeing frequent pinwheels may be the fact that your MacBook Pro only has only 4 gig of RAM. El Capitan can run on 4 gig of RAM - but there will be background memory management tasks going on while the Mac attempts to to compress and decompress RAM as well as paging. I noticed this behavior on my older 2010 Mac Book Pro - which typically has 8 gig of ram - however - I had put the original 4 gig of ram back into the MacBook Pro when I took it to the Apple store for a minor repair. I noticed the frequent pinwheel when switching between apps - even with a clean install of El Capitan. With 8 gig - I notice fewer pinwheels (but I do have older hardware). If you are considering giving your MacBook pro to a family member - you may want to look into upgrading it to at least 8gig. It looks as though the 13" mid 2012 MacBook Pro can be upgraded to a max of 16 gig. If you are questioning whether there is a hardware issue - you definitely want to have the Apple Store look at it. There is no cost for doing that - and since you still have Apple Care you would probably be covered if a hardware issue is discovered.
~Scott
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 one 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.
If you have an account on Pastebin, please don't select Private from the Paste Exposure menu on the page, because then no one but you will be able to see it.
How do I do a general cleanup to eliminate the constant twirling of the rainbow wheel?
