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Perpetual Spinning Wheel on Macbook Pro

I need help troubleshooting my mid 2010 Macbook Pro, 15" --perpetual spinning wheel. I created another user account and it worked ok for that account for 3-4 weeks, then same thing happens. I created a third user account and same thing. Wheel spinning so slow that I can nearly access previously created accounts, if at all. Sounds like a software issue, else i would not be able to create other user accounts, right??


Temporary fixes that helped for a while have included emptying cache, deleting cookies but even these quit working after a while.


Running OS X Yosemite Ver 10.10.5

Processor 2.66 GHz Intel Core i7

Memory 8 GB 1067 MHz DDR3

Graphics Intel HD Graphics 288 MB


Where do I start looking for problems? It occurs so gradually that I can't pinpoint out what I am doing to cause the spinning wheel to slow to a crawl and then spin forever. Tasks I do a lot of include: surf the internet, Facebook, email, use Microsoft Office (mainly Word and Excel).


Prior to this, I started getting sudden restarts with the gray screen message: "Your computer restarted because of a problem. Press any key or wait a few seconds to continue starting up." This problem also continues to happen, but the spinning wheel, which started after, is rendering it unusable.


Yes I know the computer old, and it's probably getting to be that time. But I believe it to still be a solid machine ...and I'm not ready.


Any suggestions, anyone?

~VIN,MacBook Pro (15-inch Mid 2010), OS X Yosemite (10.10.5)

Posted on Nov 17, 2017 4:47 PM

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3 replies

Nov 17, 2017 5:54 PM in response to agirlwithoutapast

I recently had a similar sounding problem on the same model, for which Console.app entries showed repeating Disk I/O error messages when the spinning happened.


I changed HD and cable, no more spinning.


The restarts are Kernel Panics, often due to a failure in graphics switching. If you can copy a panic log entry here, it might suggest the reason. There are software work-rounds to avoid it.

Nov 18, 2017 5:50 PM in response to agirlwithoutapast

Try running this program in your normal account, then copy and paste the output in a reply. The program was created by etresoft, a frequent contributor. Please use copy and paste as screen shots can be hard to read. On the screen with Options, please open Options and check the bottom 2 boxes before running. Click “Share Report” button in the toolbar, select “Copy Report” and then paste into a reply. This will show what is running on your computer. No personal information is shown.

Etrecheck – System Information

Perpetual Spinning Wheel on Macbook Pro

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