Why I keep getting the spinning beach ball

in my finder, and I keep having to do a hard reboot. I thought it was that I didn't have a lot of space on the main drive, but I cleared that up, and now I have 40GB of free space, but it still keeps happening more then it used to.

Are you suddenly running more apps then usual? Are you running an intensive app that leaks ram? Are you running Firefox?

I mean

Yeah, I've always had a lot of apps, but there not all open a the same time. I have 4GB of Ram, and maybe that's not enough, cause I do have a lot of software installed, but again I don't know if it makes too much difference that they are not open, maybe as long as they are there it affects it, and Yes I do have Firefox, but not sure if it was open when I got the spinning beach ball. So I don't know... and just know my mouse just froze on me, and wouldn't move for like 40 seconds...

4GB is probably plenty, but Firefox does leak RAM, so it could be the source of the problem.

Start here and let us know how you make out:

http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/os-x-operating-system/93819-basic-os-x-mac-troubleshooting.html

It could be a dying drive.

It could be due to having a full drive.

It could be a memory leak of some app or any number of other things. My bet, is on the first two.

I would suggest immediately, if not sooner, back up your drive.

One thing you might try, and only because your drive was full is a defrag.
I have not had to do this on any of my OS X drives, but most recommendations are for iDefrag. It's not free, and this may or may not help. You can download it, run it and check the current fragmentation percentage before paying for it.

General rule of thumb for everyone - never allow a system partition get to the point of less than 15% free space. You are asking for problems. Keep my own at 20-25% minimum. I recommend even more for Leopard as it will use up to 60 GB of virtual memory if you allow it the room to do so. Don't know about SL yet.

3) Clean Your Caches - There are several tools that will do this for you, Onyx, MainMenu, Quicksilver...etc. Even if you don't have one of those you can still do it manually. Just delete everything in the folders Library/Caches and in Users/*Your User Name*/Library/Caches. When finished reboot.

Is this say that one is to delete all the folders inside the Cashes folder? If so, I'll assume they start over again as the application is used?

Zicky said:

in my finder, and I keep having to do a hard reboot. I thought it was that I didn't have a lot of space on the main drive, but I cleared that up, and now I have 40GB of free space, but it still keeps happening more then it used to.

Click to expand...

More info will help;
Laptop or desktop
wireless or ethernet
if laptop - same response on other networks
more than it used to? - before u did what? upgrade? reformat?reinstall

I appreciate all the responses. I'll try some of the suggestions. as far as the response for collin Bl. I have a Power Mac G5, and I use a wireless router. I checked my drive with TechTool, and id didn't give me any info as if my drive was failing, but I will back up my main drive though

I would also recommend running the maintenance tasks in a program like Onyx as well as doing a Verify/Repair Permissions and Verify/Repair Disk in Disk Utility.