| One thing that I didn't see at the site (during my admittedly very quick skim) was the need for a 'proper' amount of RAM. Without it, you'll see the beachball often, especially if you use more than a few applications at a time, or if you leave your computer on for weeks at a time and some app (or browser plugin, etc.) has a memory leak.
In Activity Monitor, in the "System Memory" tab, you want to get your 'page outs' as close to zero as you can afford. RAM has never been cheaper or easier to install, and bumping up to 8 GB is a great way to keep your system from using the 1000x slower hard disk to pretend to be the RAM that your system is looking for. (That's what the 'page outs' are -- your computer taking information from RAM and storing it temporarily on the disk. 'Page ins' are the opposite -- information coming from the disk when needed and being written to RAM.) Most modern macs can take at least 8GB, and often more, as of this writing. Costs tend to be less than $50 if you shop around.
If you're staring at a beachball instead of getting work done, $50 starts to look cheap. Check your page-out numbers to see if this tip can help you.
--Dennis
PS: Randy, feel free to edit this however you like. You won't hurt my feelings at all.
On Oct 10, 2012, at 9:38 PM, "Randy B. Singer" < email@hidden> wrote: With the advent of both Lion and Mountain Lion, I've been hearing from a surprising number of folks who have been complaining about their Macintosh slowing down and frequent sightings of the Rotating Beachball (RBB). It turns out that not all cases of the RBB are the same. I've been receiving so many inquiries about RBB problems from my user group, that I decided to create a Web page to help them.
Other user groups might want to refer their members having the same sort of problems to the page that I put up. You can access it here:
Macintosh OS X Beachballs!
I'd welcome feedback on how to make the page better (technically or visually.)
___________________________________________ Randy B. Singer Co-author of The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th, and 6th editions)
Macintosh OS X Routine Maintenance ___________________________________________
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