MBP beachballs alot, how do i fix that?

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I got a 16~ month old MBP running Mac OS X version 10.6.8 2.4 Ghz intel core 2 duo with 4gb of ram i presume. Every day it has the little beachball pop up for anywhere from a couple seconds to 20-30 seconds. I'm using Firefox if that matters, and its got about 3-4 months of history saved if that could be slowing it down
 
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Ok I'm about to go ape stuff on my MB, it has been beach balling forever trying to do something simple like open Firefox. What should I do? I have a he I've been backing my stuff up on,is there any way to do a complete restore and restore my computer back 2 weeks?
 
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ok i uninstalled onyx and removed firefox, that seems to have fixed the problem for the most part, but the dam computer still beachballs every now and then... I though MBP's weren't suppose to that?
 

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... I though MBP's weren't suppose to that?

All Mac's will do this (beachballs) eventually...even 12-core Mac Pro's with 64gig of ram. Some things that influence when "beachballs" appear are:

- amount of installed ram
- if hard drive is near full
- number of apps. open simultaneously
- amount of time since last restart
- maintenance performed on HD (Onyx)
- time since permissions were last repaired

For additional info, see the "beachballs" link in my signature.

HTH,

- Nick
 
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All Mac's will do this (beachballs) eventually...even 12-core Mac Pro's with 64gig of ram. Some things that influence when "beachballs" appear are:

- amount of installed ram---stock ram
- if hard drive is near full---nope plenty of room
- number of apps. open simultaneously---no apps open
- amount of time since last restart----1 day
- maintenance performed on HD (Onyx)---tbh i think onyx slowed it down
- time since permissions were last repaired---how do i do this?

For additional info, see the "beachballs" link in my signature.

HTH,

- Nick
I switched to Safari and deleted firefox and onyx and for the most part its working better
 

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I switched to Safari and deleted firefox and onyx and for the most part its working better

The six parameters I mentioned above can all contribute to the appearance of "beachballs". And these six things are not a "one-time...set it & forget it sort of thing"...but an ongoing situation that needs to be monitored.

Mentioning that you have "stock ram"...means almost nothing...a number is what is needed. 2gig, 4gig, 6gig, 8gig, etc. The more ram the better when it comes the occurrence of "beachballs".

Onyx doesn't slow anything down. You launch Onyx, run the clean-up routines, then quit the program.

To repair permissions...open Disk Utility...then click on "repair permissions".

- Nick
 
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The six parameters I mentioned above can all contribute to the appearance of "beachballs". And these six things are not a "one-time...set it & forget it sort of thing"...but an ongoing situation that needs to be monitored.

Mentioning that you have "stock ram"...means almost nothing...a number is what is needed. 2gig, 4gig, 6gig, 8gig, etc. The more ram the better when it comes the occurrence of "beachballs".

Onyx doesn't slow anything down. You launch Onyx, run the clean-up routines, then quit the program.

To repair permissions...open Disk Utility...then click on "repair permissions".

- Nick
All i know is the computer shouldn't be doing this, and i tried Onyx and my computer didn't seem to like it, is there any other highly recommended computer cleaner-upper?
 

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All i know is the computer shouldn't be doing this...

Actually that's not correct.:) I've tried to explain why this happens (it can happen to all Mac's eventually) if certain maintenance activities aren't performed, or if certain "bad" user habits are not avoided.

Good luck,:)

- Nick

p.s. In addition to the things I mentioned earlier that can cause "beachballs"...a hard drive that is going "bad" can also cause this.
 

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Much of this is covered in the Basic OS X Troubleshooting article I pointed you to in my first post. I haven't responded (until now) because you haven't confirmed whether you've gone through any of the steps.

Also, I would actually recommend Maintenance instead of Onyx. Onyx is great if you know what you're doing. But Maintenance runs many of the same needed processes, but isn't too technical.
 
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Is there a way to manually stop my MBP from indexing everything? It's been at it for 3 straight days and hasn't made any progress?
 

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Is there a way to manually stop my MBP from indexing everything? It's been at it for 3 straight days and hasn't made any progress?

Yes. Open Spotlight in System Preferences. Click the Privacy tab and drag the Macintosh HD icon into the list. That will stop all indexing.

With that said, that makes me think you've got some kind of a filesystem error. Did you ever run through the steps I listed in the blog article?
 
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I've shut it down and used onyx, repaired the permissions, switched browsers. And it's still beachballing like crazy. I got a Hard Drive that ive been backing up the MB with every couple o weeks, can i restore the whole computer to previous date and try to solve the problem?
 

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I've shut it down and used onyx, repaired the permissions, switched browsers. And it's still beachballing like crazy. I got a Hard Drive that ive been backing up the MB with every couple o weeks, can i restore the whole computer to previous date and try to solve the problem?

I would be willing to bet that hard drive is going south. Please download and run the SMART Utility and let me know what it says about the drive:

Volitans Software- Makers of SMART Utility for the Mac

This is a trial version, but don't worry about that - you just need to run it once to get a health report about the drive.
 
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Im guessing thats bad?
Screenshot2011-12-21at31639PM.png
 

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Yep, it's toast.

Fortunately, replacing one isn't terribly difficult and although hard drive prices are currently way up, an equivalent drive shouldn't cost you much more than $100.
 
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Yep, it's toast.

Fortunately, replacing one isn't terribly difficult and although hard drive prices are currently way up, an equivalent drive shouldn't cost you much more than $100.

I got off the phone with the apple tech support and they had me delete some cache files and do some other stuff and the computer is much more bearable, but it still BB's every now and then
 

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That drive will only get worse until it completely fails. Keep good backups until you replace it!
 
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Will do, imma give tech support a call and tell them clearing the cache thing quit working. Im just going to keep going through all the steps till my MBP is back to normal, or they give me a new computer
 

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Will do, imma give tech support a call and tell them clearing the cache thing quit working. Im just going to keep going through all the steps till my MBP is back to normal, or they give me a new computer

I don't think you understand - this is a hardware problem, not a software problem. Your computer has a device inside of it called a hard drive (it's a small tin-shaped device, about the size of a deck of cards). Hard drives are mechanical in nature and therefore prone to failure. If the machine is under warranty, Apple should replace the hard drive free of charge. If it's out of warranty, you'll need to replace it yourself.

They won't replace the entire machine just because the hard drive failed. It's a very common point of failure (it's not actually made by Apple, but one of several different companies that specializes in hard drives). You can run all the repairs you want, but it's just delaying the inevitable - eventually the machine just won't boot.

Like I mentioned, if it's under warranty, it shouldn't take your local Apple Store more than 30 minutes to replace right there in-store. And if you have a good backup, I would bring it with you so that they can put it right back the way it was prior to the drive failing.

I would also recommend running the Apple Hardware Test before you take it in - this should yield an error code, which they'll want. That will save you some headache in that you won't have to mess around with troubleshooting steps over the phone.

Here's how to run the AHT:

Intel-based Macs: Using Apple Hardware Test
 

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