NEW Mac User, Spinning Beach Ball, tried a few things....help?

So I was given a Macbook Pro the other day as a payment. Well, yeah.
It's -extremely- slow. I'm talking, absurdly. Nearly every single thing I do summons the almighty beach ball of death.

It's running Yosemite. I know this because I took the HD out and hooked it up to my PC only to find that the new corestorage (is that right?) doesn't get seen inside windows. There are quite a few pictures (thousands) and songs that I would want to back up before I tried a reinstall. Problem is, I know nothing about the Mac FS. I know it's really similar to Linux. But aside from that, nothing.

I've tried Veryfing the disc but it gets about 45 minutes in and will sit there for hours. I tried doing it in Recovery mode but it didn't seem to fix anything.

What would be the quickest method of backing up pics/music? I have a thumb drive I can use. I need to mount it and format it to something more agreeable first. Heck, just getting to the point of opening the thumb drive takes something like 3-5 minutes.

Sorry if this is a bit incoherent, I've been at this all day. Ug.

Thoughts anyone?
I know it's an i3, or maybe i5, 4GB, 500GB HD. Yosemite...

It sounds like the the MBPro's HDD is failing and needs to be replaced.

Backup or clone any important user data to some compatible Mac OS X device while you still can. Even if it's slow as cold molasses.

I'd probably suggest to avoid using your Windows PC with it and avoid screwing things up further.

I was leaning towards a failing HD. It runs absolutely perfect when using a guest account. You would think that with a failing HD, even the guest account would suffer.

Minutes waiting for the beach ball is almost always either 1) a failing drive or b) a full drive with no where near enough contiguous free space.

How much free space on the drive?

If the guest account is working, then create a new admin account and try it out.
If you have not already done a clean install and are using the former owner's install, all the software is going to be tied to their AppleID and will ultimately cause you headaches. You will, of course, lose all of their software upon doing a clean install.

What do you mean it didn't "seem" to fix anything? Running the Repair Disk will either report some repair(s) made or report that the drive is ok. Reporting the drive is ok doesn't mean that it is.

bobtomay said:

Minutes waiting for the beach ball is almost always either 1) a failing drive or b) a full drive with no where near enough contiguous free space.

How much free space on the drive?

If the guest account is working, then create a new admin account and try it out.
If you have not already done a clean install and are using the former owner's install, all the software is going to be tied to their AppleID and will ultimately cause you headaches. You will, of course, lose all of their software upon doing a clean install.

What do you mean it didn't "seem" to fix anything? Running the Repair Disk will either report some repair(s) made or report that the drive is ok. Reporting the drive is ok doesn't mean that it is.

Click to expand...

The free space issue had (has) me a bit confused at first. When I would open the disk utility, on the left, the first thing listed is "Macintosh HD" When I select that, it says my capacity is 499GB with 19MB free space. (Was 25MB). The type is Logical Volume Group and it's online. Now directly below the Mac HD on the left, is yet another Mac HD, which I believe is the actual partition. It says I have 448GB free, Encrypted Logical Partition, mount /, etc.

As far as repair/verify not doing anything, I mean they each found various things and repaired them but it didn't fix the issue I am having. I will try to create another account now, see if the issue isn't tied to the current account.

Are you running that Mac with FileVault or some sort of encryption being enabled?? That can sure slow things down to a crawl.

pm-r said:

Are you running that Mac with FileVault or some sort of encryption being enabled?? That can sure slow things down to a crawl.

Click to expand...

I think so.
Disk Utility says the drive is encrypted.

dysphunktion said:

When I would open the disk utility, on the left, the first thing listed is "Macintosh HD" When I select that, it says my capacity is 499GB with 19MB free space. (Was 25MB).

Click to expand...

There is the problem right there.
You have only 19MB free, when you should have at least 20GB feee for the OS to run smoothly and at its optimum.
You need to try and get some stuff off the HD before its going to be of any use to you.
Apple say to have at least 20% free on your HD, so it can use .swapfiles, and move stuff around, without it bogging down the System. With 19MB free, I'm surprised you can even boot to the Admin account.

I would be making a new Admin account, and move across what you need to get started, check its moved ok, and delete from the Bogged Down Account.
Then of a complete Backup of the Bogged Down account, make sure the backup is OK and Delete the Bogged Down account, and then restore to the New Admin Acct from the Backup.

+1. And I had just noticed the lack of drive space, and a recent OS X install needs double the amount of installed RAM memory as an absolute minimum. So free drive space should be in GBs, not MBs!!!


EDIT:
But quite strange to read the comment:
"It runs absolutely perfect when using a guest account". I guess not much was being attempted or something's a bit strange.

TM, I have to guess that's the drive and not the partition. You can tell because is is listed as a Logical Volume Group. I haven't yet figured out in what all cases (I've had it happen to one of my machines.) When Yosemite is installed, it is defaulting to set up the whole drive as a LVG to make it easier for FileVault use. The LVG will show as none to very little free space, because the entire drive is then used to create the partition. (It's crazy and I haven't quite wrapped my head around it yet. - I did figure out how to undo the LVG and get back to normal, because as an LVG, it takes away your ability to manipulate partitions or even re-partition the drive without erasing the partition first.)

dysphunction is correct - the one under that is the actual partition.

This solved my issue with spinning beach ball

I installed Yosemite and began to be plagued with the spinning beach ball. After a couple of hours searching for a solution, I discovered that Dropbox is the culprit. I took the steps below and it solved the problem for me:

1. Click on the Dropbox icon up in the very top of your screen.
2. Click on gearbox icon in bottom right.
3. Click on Preferences
4. Uncheck the box Enable Finder integration.

I hope that resolves it for you.
Craig

I seem to be following your posts this morning SiteHatcher and just came from here:
Yosemite = Spinning Beach Ball.....***? - Page 4 - ehMac.ca

Anyway, for the benefit of others in the same situation, they may want to read more about the problem and "fix" as well as some consequences:
https://www.dropbox.com/help/7183
https://www.dropbox.com/help/7144