Beach ball of death on MBP

Turbo Turtle

I know there is another tread on this topic however wasn't really sure what was been talked about! I am new to mac and love it (bar a few things like word) but over the past while it freezes and the beach ball comes on and I have to turn it off with the power button. Also some times as I turn the mac on I have to turn it off again to get it to work.

Can anyone give me an idiots guide on what may be wrong and how to rectify it?

Thanks

drunkmonkey

Sounds like the hard drive is on it's way out, download http://www.corecode.at/smartreporter/index.html Smart reporter and see what it says after the crashes, could point you in the right direction.

whiterebel

Turbo Turtle wrote: »

I know there is another tread on this topic however wasn't really sure what was been talked about! I am new to mac and love it (bar a few things like word) but over the past while it freezes and the beach ball comes on and I have to turn it off with the power button. Also some times as I turn the mac on I have to turn it off again to get it to work.

Can anyone give me an idiots guide on what may be wrong and how to rectify it?

Thanks

You need to supply a few details.
Which machine is it.
How old it is
Amount of RAM
Which version of the OS its running.

Sad Professor

Verify the hard disk in Disk Utility.

Is the machine slow to boot up? Are apps slow to open? Have you installed any RAM?

Turbo Turtle

it is slower than when first got it but i have a good few apps on it and music. Don't Keep many files on it cause I use a lot of them for work so keep them on an external hard drive.

Its a 15inch Mid 2010 Macbook pro
Processor 2.53 GHz Intel Core i5
Memory 4 GB 1067 MHz DDR3
Graphics NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M 256 MB
Software Mac OS X Lion 10.7.2 (11C74)

I have been thinking about updating the memory to around 8gb have apron 700mb free according to the free memory app on the app store.

Turbo Turtle

after restarting my mac i actually have around 1.5gb free memory.

Sad Professor

It's unlikely lack of RAM is the problem. Did you check the hard disk?

Turbo Turtle

i ve tried repairing it but wont let me and any of the sites of looked at what they say didnt seem to work but i may be just doing it wrong. Any ideas or tips on How i can solve the problem (first mac and love it, so still Learning)

Colonel Panic

Are you running Lion? Reboot your computer and hold the Option key as it starts. Select Recovery HD to boot into Lion Recovery. From there you can start Disk Utility and repair your HD.

If you're not running Lion, you can do the same thing by booting from an OSX install disk.

cornbb

It could be the case that Disk Utility won't let you repair the disk while you are actually booted into it. You might have more luck using the installation CD. Not sure if its out of date, but there seems to be a good guide to that here:
http://kb.wisc.edu/page.php?id=3810 Don't forget to back everything up first!

Also, I still wouldn't rule out low RAM as being the culprit. 4Gb is normally plenty but it's still possible for a runaway program to eat up most of it. Search for "Activity Monitor" in spotlight and open it. Cmd-click its dock icon and select Options->Keep In Dock. Cmd-click again and select Dock Icon -> Show Memory Usage.

You'll now have a pie chart in the dock that you can check to see whether you are running short on RAM. If you see the green slice disappear entirely and see mostly yellow and red, then something is eating your RAM. Make sure to check it *while the beach ball is spinning*.

If this happens, open Activity Monitor, go to the System Monitor tab and sort the table by the Real Mem column. The most RAM-hungry process will now appear at the top. If you see something take up more than, say, 2-3Gb then that could be your problem. Memory hogs like this can cause your Spinning Pizza Of Death because once the system runs out of RAM it does something called paging which involves using the Hard Disk for memory - this can really slow a machine down, especially if the disk approaches becoming full.

Make sure to keep a good chunk of disk space free too - anything over 10% should be fine.

Its also possible that some recently-installed piece of software is using a bad kext (kernel extension) although that kind of thing can be a pain to track down.

Another thing you could do is search for Console in spotlight and take a look at log entries that occur around the time (or just before) you see the SPOD. Next time you have this problem, make a note of the time the SPOD occurs and take a look in Console after you reboot the machine. It can be tricky to figure out which lines are actually useful unless you are used to them - but the kernel.log entries (which can be selected in the column on the left) are frequently the most helpful for this type of issue, followed by system.log.

Hope that helps!

Wibbs

It might be the hard drive TT. To check, in the Finder go to your menubar, click on Go, then Utilities, then find Disk Utility. Start that up. Now when it's open you'll see on the left hand side of the window "two" disks. Highlight the top/first one, then look down at the bottom of the window at S.M.A.R.T status. If that's in red you're defo on the way out hard disk wise, so back up and look into a new internal drive. If it says it's OK then likely it's not a mechanical hard drive failure(though it's not 100%). OK then above that you'll see a button on the right Verify disk. Run that and see what it says. If it comes back OK, then generally speaking the disk itself is OK. While you're at it click the repair permissions button. Though this is not the catchall magic fix many seem to think, it's worth doing.

However;

Turbo Turtle wrote: »

Its a 15inch Mid 2010 Macbook pro
Processor 2.53 GHz Intel Core i5
Memory 4 GB 1067 MHz DDR3
Graphics NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M 256 MB
Software Mac OS X Lion 10.7.2 (11C74)

That particular range of macbooks with the nvidia 330 are well known, or at least a suspicious number of the machines are, for having kernel panics, video errors, beachball of death and hard crashes that need rebooting. Try something TT, when it spins the beachball of death leave it for half an hour. If it comes back to normal after a while it would be a good indication that this issue of yours is coming from the same place.

After a lot of web traffic on the problem, inc 100+ page threads on apples own discussion forums they've finally admitted there may be a problem(nice of them:rolleyes:). This problem became more obvious for many after the release of Lion. Video on these macs is handled by two processes. The first is on the intel chip itself, the second when you need more power is handled by the NVIDIA chip. The problem seems to be with the latter or switching to the latter. That said IMHO in the macbooks affected it's a hardware error to do with the video card, not software as Apple are hinting. I say hardware because I've seen this happen when running windows in bootcamp and third party apps that allow you to switch off the NVIDIA chip usually solve the problem. People who've kicked up stink and had the logic board replaced have had these problems go away.

BTW it doesn't just happen in obvious high graphic use situations. Sometimes the NVIDIA chip kicks in when only resizing windows or scrolling. EG The latest iTunes is more prone to it. Lion seems to cause it more because it seems it accesses the NVIDIA chip more in general than Snow leopard did. I've seen this happen when someone was typing in word and moved the window.

LukeS_

Just posting on this thread opposed to making a new thread. Have that activity manager thing in my dock and there's no green? Only 2/4 yellow, 1/4 blue and 1/4 red. Chrome is taking up 244mb of memory, while that activity manager takes up 35mb and flash a massive 750mb. I usually don't turn off my MBP, only put it to sleep so it turns on quicker. Should I be shutting it down? I don't want it to become detrimental in the future.

Colonel Panic

These days, you shouldn't need to shut down any computer.

The issue is Flash. Can you uninstall it or use a plugin with Chrome that disables it unless you want to run flash on a page?

The blue memory is inactive but cached, the red is memory the OS is using.

Turbo Turtle

cheers for all the replies. Thats why you gotta love boards after trawling through crap sites trying find the answer, go on boards and sorted (hopefully). Hard disk says its ok now.

Liameter

cornbb wrote: »

4Gb is normally plenty

Just a little correction to a common mistake: that should say "4GB is normally plenty". (Obviously 4 Gigabits - as opposed to GigaBytes - is NOT plenty.)

conor.hogan.2

I doubt anyway thought that.