Little spinning color wheel?

Brand new switcher here and have had my new iMac 6 days now. Something went wrong today and my screen just went black. After screaming a bit I got it to work, BUT now I have this tiny little spinning color wheel that replaces my mouse arrow whenever I move it over the desktop. Duh. I have done "Restart", "Sleep", and "Shutdown" but it's still there!! How do I get rid of it?

try going up to the menu bar and clicking the apple and then do a force quit. see if that helps

the color wheel, or beachball as some like to call it is like the windows hourglass. it just means that something is going on in the background and locking you out of any interactivity, or that a program is non-responsive.

if you can get to your apple menu on the menu bar, select force quit from that and see if anyting is non-responsive. you can then force quit those applications. if nothing says non-responsive, just start quitting applications you think might be a problem. if all else fails, you can hold the power button to force a shutdown. and then cross your fingers at start up.

if you can get any more specific information about what might be causing the problem, let us know so we can offer more assitance.

Eric, IT WORKED!! Thank you so much. (I added to your rep!)

Carleen

no problem! glad to help!