spinning rainbow wheel

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I'm sure this is a common question. I've had my macbook for a little over a year and use it exclusively for the internet. Recently, I've been using the "force quit" option because the machine freezes and that colored, spinning wheel is on the screen. It has to be because of junk files. Right? How do I clean it up?

thanks
 

Raz0rEdge

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2022 Mac Studio M1 Max, 2023 M2 MBA
It doesn't necessarily have to be due to junk files, but the first thing to do is to repair permissions using Disk Utility..you'll want to boot up with your OS X disk and run that. THat might take care of a lot of the issues, next you an try OnyX to clean things up further..

Then make sure that you have enough free space on the disk and remove any unused/unneeded files..

Regards
 
M

MacInWin

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The spinning beach ball can also be caused by not having sufficient memory for all the running programs, so you might look at that as well.
 
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chas_m

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I find that jakerich's answer is generally the right one most of the time ... a LOT of people (particularly Windows switchers) appear to be unaware of how to properly quit programs, so they stay open ... eventually this reaches dozens of open programs and the RAM is all used up, which causes much slower VRAM to kick in, followed by eventual loss of all disk space and then real trouble.

Try restarting the machine, and preventing any auto-loading programs from loading (or let them load, then REALLY quit them as in "command-q"). See if the problem goes away. If it doesn't, check your hard drive's free space.
 
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I'm sure this is a common question. I've had my macbook for a little over a year and use it exclusively for the internet. Recently, I've been using the "force quit" option because the machine freezes and that colored, spinning wheel is on the screen. It has to be because of junk files. Right? How do I clean it up?

How much RAM do you have installed in your MacBook? (If you have less than a couple of gigabytes of RAM, and run a bunch of programs at the same time, this may be the crux of the problem.)

Is this a problem that just recently started, or have you always had a problem with programs freezing that required you to force quit them? (If you have had your computer for over a year, and this has just recently started, I would assume that the problem isn't that you don't know how to quit programs, and i would suspect that you also have a reasonable amount of RAM installed.)

Do all of your programs tend to freeze during use, or does this only occur in specific programs?

Does the problem get better if you only run one program at a time?

I suggest that you run all of the recommended routine maintenance on this Web site,
OS X Maintenance And Troubleshooting
and see if that resolves the problem.

If it does not, try this:

Locate and launch Activity Monitor (in Applications/Utilities), click on the heading for "%CPU" and click on the triangle next to "%CPU" until things are sorted in order from biggest to smallest. See if there is something hogging all of the CPU time.
 

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