All i know about this,is that it commonly known as the Spinning Wheel of Death. I heard off some one that the computer is doing multi-tasks,and that the computer is telling you that it is quite busy.OK tell me Gary?
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Mr Anthony Cotton
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The Spinning Wheel Computer doing Multi-tasks
Comments: 8 Responses to “The Spinning Wheel Computer doing Multi-tasks”
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It is basically just a "please wait" message. It doesn't necessarily have anything to do with multitasking, though your Mac is always multitasking with dozens of system processes and other things going on.
It just means that the application you are using right now is busy doing something, probably responding to your commands or some outside stimulus (network activity, game activity, etc). Usually it is just for a second or less.
It is only the "spinning wheel of death" when it is there for a long time or indefinitely, usually meaning that the application you are using has crashed in some way. Much more common in earlier versions of OS X, and less common now in Snow Leopard and Lion.
Now i know what that is now. It appears more than just a few seconds though. I still have my Mac Mini off 2007 and it has only 1GB of memory,and its obvious that it showed up pretty regular on there. It does appear on the Snow Leopard for more than a few seconds, but this is always on the internet. Yes when i think about it a message came up,and said something,but this was only on the Mac Mini.
Thanks Gary
Your MAC Mini is, perhaps, overtaxed. When I see the "spinning wheel of death' - i let it run for 10-15 minutes on my well-memoried/Intel (ha) MacBook Pro. If it doesn't clear itself in a relatively-reasonable period - recommend force shut the MAC down. There are all kinds of things you might not know about (okay - you know EVERYTHING going on on your computer...) -- running in the background, (like USB/Time Machine drives). Have never (yet...) run into a forced-shutdown that burped when booting back up.
I hardly use the Mac Mini now,and i did exactly what you said. I just use to watch it say after ten minutes(cup of tea in between)and if it was still there like you said i just shut it down. It worked when i started it up again. I catch your drift what you are saying. I am not technically minded and 63yrs old. How do you learn all this stuff. Thanks Dave
I am running Snow Leopard & I also get The Spinning Beach Ball of Death (the term I saw years ago & like) ONLY while running my web browsers. I have 8GB RAM, but I leave Activity Monitor open specifically to see what apps are eating up my CPU power & memory, and to KILL processes when neccesary. Firefox OFTEN becomes unresponsive, Chromium is constantly telling me pages are unresponsive, and even Safari will give me messages like, "In order to open this page, all other Safari windows need to be refreshed (or reloaded)." What could possibly be causing these problems. I know I have a lot of windows & tabs open. Still, it seems that once the browsers start to slow down, even closing tabs & windows don't speed them up again. I have to shut them down completely.
Does this happen at a particular site or sites?
A lot of sites use Flash. Try re-installing Flash to make sure you have the most recent version.
I am also plagued with the spinning beach ball. How do I reinstall or update flash player?
Go to the Adobe web site to re-install Flash. http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/