Spinning beach ball

I have a year and a half old macbook pro running snow leopard, 2.53 processor and 4 gig of ram,recently thou the spinning beach ball has been getting more and more frequent in general non intensive use.
It is all backed up using time machine to a external hard drive,question is if I was to wipe everything and do a full clean install and then restored from my time machine backup would I be restoring all the bugs (and problems) back onto my clean install or would it just reinstall my files,but not all the junk.
I have run onyx,omni disk sweeper and clean my mac,but all to no avail,also keep my eye on activity monitor,but nothing obvious going on there either.

When was the last time you restarted your computer?
How full is your hard drive?
When was the last time you repaired permissions?
How many programs do you usually have open at the same time?

- Nick

I have a 320GB hard drive with 95 gig free,repaired permissions a few days ago,it did that for me when I ran the onyx software.
Mac gets shutdown every other day I guess,somedays I leave it sleeping,but others I shut it down.
Ohh and usually have about 3 or 4 programs open (safari,aperture,itunes,nothing much more)

Cheers

Ah the wheel of death - Our mac kept doing this - Do you ever get a flashing question mark come up when re starting the machine - You can run a hardware scan on the hdd using osx install disc 2.

On top of what Nick asked, do you move a lot of large files (movie files for example) on and off the drive?

I do. And once I hit that point where you're sitting at about 30% free space, the slow downs and spinning ball became unbearable to me. (Of course, it doesn't take much for me.) I ended up purchasing iDefrag and defragging the hard drive along with cleaning up enough to take me back to 40% free space. Between these two, it took care of mine.

I would also suggest popping in your original disc and running a verify and repair on the drive if you haven't done that.

Some folks, instead of using iDefrag, will use SuperDuper! or CarbonCopyCloner to make a bootable external drive, boot to that drive and then do it again back to their internal. That'll write everything back to the beginning of the drive. A clean install and restore from TM should do the same thing.

You might want to download the trial of iDefrag and have it run a scan - while OS X does a great job of keeping files from being fragmented, my free space was 25% fragmented at the time.

I have a 320GB drive also and thinking it's time to upgrade it again as I'm just not able to keep it at that 40% free space any longer. That really has been the magic number for me on both my Windows and OS X machines for the past 15 years or so to keep them running smoothly.

One quick addition to what "Bobtomay" mentioned about "popping in your original disc and running a verify and repair on the drive" (Bob may have been inferring this as well).

That although your computer is only 1.5 years old...and normally it is unlikely...there is always the possibility that there's a problem with your hard drive...and this might require replacing it. I think that this is unlikely...and what is probably more likely is that your hard drive just needs some periodic maintenance...but I just wanted to mention it as a "long-shot" possibility.

Good luck,

- Nick

Thanks for the replies you have been of much help:Blushing:
I bit the bullet and bought idefrag yesterday and let it run its course,thats why its taken me so long to reply as it was going most of the day and into the night so obviously needed doing badly!!
Things definitely seem snappier,but will keep an eye on it over the next few days.
Cheers
RBHD1

More likely to be a RAM issue, I think.
Answers to Nick's questions would be useful for someone to trying to help you.

toMACsh said:

More likely to be a RAM issue, I think.
Answers to Nick's questions would be useful for someone to trying to help you.

Click to expand...

I did answer Nick's questions I thought,the only thing I haven't done as yet is put my original disk in and repair the permissions. Is this different to repairing the permissions through the disk utility?
If I have missed out some answers please let me know and I will try and fill in the details as I am grateful for peoples time and help.

rbhd1 said:

...the only thing I haven't done as yet is put my original disk in and repair the permissions. Is this different to repairing the permissions through the disk utility?

Click to expand...

I don't think repairing "permissions" is different...but if you need to do "disk repairs"...that can only be done if you boot from a CD/DVD.

- Nick

pigoo3 said:

I don't think repairing "permissions" is different...but if you need to do "disk repairs"...that can only be done if you boot from a CD/DVD.

- Nick

Click to expand...

Just performed the disk repairs to from my snow leopard install disk,it said all ok no problems
I didn't realise I could/had to do half of this stuff as part of general maintenace,so a big thank you to everybody's help :Blushing:

rbhd1 said:

I did answer Nick's questions I thought,

Click to expand...

Oops! Yes you did. Sorry, I obviously missed that. Thanks for kindly nudging me to look more closely.