
- #Imac spinning wheel after a few minutes mac os x#
- #Imac spinning wheel after a few minutes software#
- #Imac spinning wheel after a few minutes mac#
- #Imac spinning wheel after a few minutes windows#
You don’t have to keep an Activity Monitor window open all the time there are less obtrusive ways to use it.

To find out if the CPU is a bottleneck on performance, use Activity Monitor (/Applications/Utilities) to monitor CPU usage. Even everyday activities-such as syncing with iTunes-can temporarily overtax the CPU.
#Imac spinning wheel after a few minutes mac#
It’s not unusual to see the occasional beach ball when you Mac is performing complex computing tasks.
#Imac spinning wheel after a few minutes software#
The most basic reason the beach ball appears is because your Mac’s hardware can’t handle the software task at hand. At times like those, it helps to know why the thing appears and what you can do to make it go away. When it doesn’t go away, it turns into what some call the Spinning Beach Ball of Death (also known as the SBBOD or the Marble of Doom). Usually, the pinwheel quickly reverts to the mouse pointer.
#Imac spinning wheel after a few minutes mac os x#
If an application does not respond for about 2 to 4 seconds, the spinning wait cursor appears.” ( WindowServer is the background process that runs the Mac OS X graphical user interface.) Which is to say, the beachball is there to tell you your Mac is too busy with a task to respond normally. Whatever you call it, the colorful pinwheel that replaces your mouse cursor is not a welcome sight.Īccording to Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines, “the spinning wait cursor is displayed automatically by the window server when an application cannot handle all of the events it receives. Colloquially, it goes by many names, including the Spinning Beach Ball.
#Imac spinning wheel after a few minutes windows#
Read this Apple Support Discussions thread suspecting Time Machine or Windows Server causing a continuously spinning external hard drive.Officially, it’s called the Spinning Wait Cursor or the Spinning Disc Pointer. Read this Apple Support Discussions thread regarding a continuously spinning external hard drive. Just why it's periodically talking to your external drive is unclear, but you can't do without it." Resources It also does the grunt work of launching new user applications" "Window Server is responsible for managing the display and mediating between the various applications and other processes that want to display information on it. To get an idea of what processes are causing your drive to be accessed, you can open Activity Monitor in your Applications, Utilities folder and watch for processes to spike as the drive is accessed. option in System Preferences > Energy Saver."By most accounts, it is completely normal for a mounted external hard drive to be accessed several times per hour, even if the drive is not directly in use. However, there may be a way to control the frequency your computer accesses the external hard drive.Īpple Support Discussions user "Pondini" suggests: "Some drives respond to the Put the hard disk(s) to sleep.



Can anything be done to completely make Time Machine forget that drive?" Possible work-aroundsĪs stated earlier, this does not appear to be an issue caused by a bug. I repeatedly hear the FireWire drive rev up each time this happens and its very distracting when working at my computer. When Time machine is backing up to it, it is understandable, but it "churns" even when Time machine is not using it, for example, when I simply save a file to my documents folder (I never save anything directly to my Time Machine drive) or sometimes for no reason at all."Apple Support Discussions user "Robert Weingarten" adds: "Although I have turned off Time Machine in the Preference panel, several times per hour TM keeps trying to access the external FireWire HD that it formerly used to do backups. I normally do not like to leave it on, because it "cycles." By that I mean, it will go to sleep, or "spin down," and then a few minutes later, for some reason it will wake back up again. I understand that it should stay on and connected to my Mac so that time machine can make its periodic backups. While this issue does not have a clear solution, most people agree that the disk access is normal and not a result of a bug.Īpple Support Discussions user "Timothy Arends1" writes: "I have an external LaCie FireWire hard drive that I use for Time machine. Some Time Machine users are concerned that the drive was being accessed by another, unauthorized application or because of a bug. People have been noticing that their external hard drives continue to spin even when they have stopped using the drive.
