Spinning color wheel

Lately, I've been getting looooooooong waits while the color wheel spins before a site or app opens. Why is this happening and how can I speed things up?

Model and year of Mac.
How much ram ?
How big is hard drive and how much free space ?
Have you done a repair disk permissions ?
What OS are you running ?

@AADIVER...not necessary to double post...and certainly not necessary to triple post!

Thanks,

- Nick

New to the Forum; not intentional to double post; newbie error.

osxx said:

Model and year of Mac.
How much ram ?
How big is hard drive and how much free space ?
Have you done a repair disk permissions ?
What OS are you running ?

Click to expand...

Model Name: iMac
Model Identifier: iMac5,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.16 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache (per processor): 4 MB
Memory: 1 GB
Bus Speed: 667 MHz
Boot ROM Version: IM51.0090.B09
SMC Version: 1.9f4
Serial Number: QP72316EVUV

How do I run a repair disk permission?
Bought the Mac in 2007

Bump the memory up 1GB does not seem to cut it anymore.
Applications Folder> Utilities > Disk Utility > select drive on left column and look at the bottom of the right column and select repair.

osxx said:

Bump the memory up 1GB does not seem to cut it anymore.
Applications Folder> Utilities > Disk Utility > select drive on left column and look at the bottom of the right column and select repair.

Click to expand...

I followed your instructions and here's what I get:

First Aid Failed
Disk Utility stopped verifying "c" because the following error was encountered:
The underlying task reported failure on exit.

I haven't a clue what all this means. Help!!

AADIVER said:

I followed your instructions and here's what I get:

First Aid Failed
Disk Utility stopped verifying "c" because the following error was encountered:
The underlying task reported failure on exit.

I haven't a clue what all this means. Help!!

Click to expand...

It's always possible that your hard drive is dead!

The good news is a new hard drive is not that expensive...the potential bad news is (if you didn't back everything up)...is you may have lost all your files.

- Nick

Hard drive is just fine, so why does the color wheel spin so much?

AADIVER said:

I followed your instructions and here's what I get:

First Aid Failed
Disk Utility stopped verifying "c" because the following error was encountered:
The underlying task reported failure on exit.

I haven't a clue what all this means. Help!!

Click to expand...

AADIVER said:

Hard drive is just fine, so why does the color wheel spin so much?

Click to expand...

If you "haven't a clue" (like you mentioned above)...How do you know that the hard drive is fine?

- Nick

Open up system preferences and at the bottom, under "Other", see if you have MacFuse installed. I just recently had the same problem of beach balls all the time and finally looked in the Syslog and found megabytes of MacFuse errors. I removed the utility and got my response time back to normal and no more spinning disks.

That being said, MacFuse is a legitimate utility that you might be using. I am not sure why I had it on my system, but so far, nothing has complained that it is missing. Of course, if you take it off and something you need stops working, it is a simple matter to install it again.

Only items in my Other are Deja Vu, Flip4Mac WMV, and Widget Manager. Should I Google MacFuse and install it?