BBBOD / Mid 2010 Mac Book Pro Freezing

Hello,

I need help! Great way to start a post, I know. I have a 2010 15" Mid-2010 MacBook Pro, I really only use it to surf the web and occasionally use Word to update my resume. I get the BBOD (Bouncing Beach Ball of Death) every minute or so. I have no idea what is going on. A couple of months ago, my computer kept telling me the hard drive was full. I replaced the 350 GB hard drive with a 1.5 TB, thinking that would solve the problem.. After the upgrade I have 1.1TB available... I know the next step would be to add more RAM, however, I don't use programs that are RAM intensive. I use Activity Monitor and I don't see anything that is taking up extra CPU.... My idle is normally at 65%!

How much ram does the computer have?

- Nick

p.s. The "beach ball" doesn't bounce.

Sorry... Spinning beach ball.... 4 GB of RAM

4gig of ram isn't too bad...8gig is better.

When you looked at Activity Monitor...you were at the right place. What you want to look at is the "System Memory" tab...and look at the "Page-Outs" and "Swap File" numbers.

When the computer is freshly rebooted...these values are zero. The Mac OS (as needed) writes some info to the hard drive from time to time. The more ram the computer has...the less this writing to the hard drive. Over time...the Page-Outs and Swap File values will grow & grow...and eventually they get really large...and this slows down the computer.

All that really needs to be done to remedy this is to reboot the computer...then these values return to zero. The rate at which these values grow depends on how much the computer is used/day. The more the computer is used...the quicker (days) that these files sizes grow to a point that they slow the computer.

The solutions are:

- reboot the computer more often
- ram upgrades can slow down the rate of growth of these files

Assuming that there are no hard drive problems (since this is a newer HD)...I'm guessing that the Swap File and Pageout files getting too large is what is causing the computer slowdowns & the appearance of the beachballs.

- Nick

p.s. The computer I'm currently using has 4gig of ram...and it runs fine. I just have to reboot it something like once/week...or as necessary when these files sizes get large.