iMac (late 2015) and constant color wheel...so slow

[Felicity]

Just upgraded to Catalina and trying to do anything on the iMac takes forever and I get a constant color wheel. I have called Apple several times and nothing seems to help.

 

[harryb2448]

Sounds like you have a platter drive. If so consider installng an SSD.

 

[dtravis7]

I had Catalina on a late 2012 21.5" with 5400 Platter drive. It was a bit slow but not like you describe. Could be your hard drive is dying. Mine did and it was very slow with constant beach balls. I put in a WD SSD and it took 4-5 seconds to get to the desktop!!!

 

[Rod]

One of our members has a great checklist for this issue you might like to check, found here; Macintosh OS X Beachballs!

 

[Randy B. Singer]

Just upgraded to Catalina and trying to do anything on the iMac takes forever and I get a constant color wheel. I have called Apple several times and nothing seems to help.

Thank you Rod!

Macintosh Beachballs!
Macintosh OS X Beachballs!

Macintosh Slowdown Solutions
Macintosh OS X Slowdown Solutions

You can expect your Mac to be slow normally for a few days after upgrading to any major new version of the Mac OS. It is re-indexing your hard drive, re-forming caches, etc.

It will also be noticeably slower if you've moved from a pre-Mojave OS to Catalina, if you have an internal rotating disk hard drive (RDHD). Mojave and Catalina automatically reformat your internal hard drive as APFS, which is optimized for SSD's, and really not optimized for RDHD's.

You many also have stay-resident software installed that is now outdated. Look in System Preferences --> Users & Groups --> Login Items
and see what's there. You may want to uninstall all of it.

If you have any software that runs at a low-level, like anti-virus software, or disk utility software, uninstall it using the developer's uninstaller.

If worse comes to worse, you can use Recovery to fall back to the OS that your Mac came with:
About macOS Recovery - Apple Support

 

[macgig]

Just upgraded to Catalina and trying to do anything on the iMac takes forever and I get a constant color wheel. I have called Apple several times and nothing seems to help.

I'm using Catalina on a 2015 iMac, it's working well here no beach balls. I also have a spinner drive. I know I ran disk utility... .and I removed old software.... run Etrecheck and do what it suggests... that seems to help make my iMac faster and more stable... I was getting kernel panics and restarts.

 

[Felicity]

Thank you but when it comes to the inner workings of the computer, I am at a loss. What is a spinner drive and what is Etrecheck? I am still having issues with the beach balls and it takes forever to open anything.

 

[ferrarr]

Spinner drive is commonly know as a HDD, which is a rotating disk.

EtreCheck

 

[Felicity]

Thank you. Is EtreCheck safe to download? Is an HDD disk something that I can install?

 

[chscag]

EtreCheck is offered for download in the Mac App Store. Anything from the Mac App Store is a safe download.

Installing a new drive in your iMac is probably something you don't want to attempt unless you are sure you can do it without damaging anything. Your iMac display has to first be removed. You can see the procedure at iFixit: The Free Repair Manual.

 

[ferrarr]

Thank you. Is EtreCheck safe to download? Is an HDD disk something that I can install?

Yes, I believe it is and have used it for about 3 years.

Instead of putting in a new HDD, you may want to look into running your iMac from an external USB SSD drive.

 

[Rod]

I can say from personal experience an external SSD is a real option and it can always be repurposed down the line if you decide to upgrade.


Sent from my iPhone using Mac-Forums

 

[techiesteve]

Only the other day at work I had a 2015 27" 2TB FD iMac that had been running slow and beach balling for some time. It was only brought in when it finally failed to boot. The HD had failed, the 128GB SSD was OK. The customer opted for a 2TB SSD rather than replace like for like. Made all the difference.

 

[krs]

I can say from personal experience an external SSD is a real option and it can always be repurposed down the line if you decide to upgrade.

Agree 100%
That is exactly what I did with my Mini.
I just upgraded to Mojave but using a 500 GB SSD external as the boot drive really speeded up things compared to the internal spinner drive.
And the price on sale was less than $US 50.-

 

[Rod]

Hang on a second, I have an early 2015 MBP 13" and it's a 500Gb SSD, were iMacs different?