Spinning wheel of death

[gt5 fan]

I think our mac is slowly getting the spinning wheel of death. Help! We have had our mac for 2-3 years.

 

[Grayfox]

Beach Ball.

Run hardware tests or reinstall.

 

[gt5 fan]

Beach Ball.

Run hardware tests or reinstall.

Don't really want to reinstall my mac because it's my mums and we only really get the spinning wheel of death when 2+ people are logged in.

 

[Sprite]

It might be worth running the cron scripts if the mac isn't left on routinely over night as they are part of the Unix operating system and run nightly weekly and monthly. Also run DiskUtility and scan the HDD and repair disk permissions, always run disk permissions before updating software of the OS as this will compound any issues the OS is having.

Cron Scripts

Disk Permissions

I run these two things on a regular basis (about once every two months or so) to keep on top of the HDD and so far I have had an iMac and MacBook both for 5 or more years and they have had no issues at all.

 

[gt5 fan]

I think I found out the problem with just a terminal code no downloads! It's because I have big processes so I only sometimes have 29MB of RAM left.

 

[sesselpupser]

Activity Monitor and Disk Utility are both in my dock and used often, probably more often than most applications I use, to check the permissions, disk and also to make sure that there aren't any unknown processes using up all my RAM. I use MediaLink to serve media to my PS3, one day I checked Activity Monitor to find it had opened several instances of ffmpegx which were maxing out all 6GB of my RAM... I wasn't impressed!

 

[gt5 fan]

Activity Monitor and Disk Utility are both in my dock and used often, probably more often than most applications I use, to check the permissions, disk and also to make sure that there aren't any unknown processes using up all my RAM. I use MediaLink to serve media to my PS3, one day I checked Activity Monitor to find it had opened several instances of ffmpegx which were maxing out all 6GB of my RAM... I wasn't impressed!

We only have 2GB of RAM .