Beach ball!

7upfree

Hey all. Our 2010 iMac at home recently had the hard drive replaced and we had an SSD fitted at the same time. Super fast when we got it back and we put ML on it. But in the past fortnight at times it's taking ages to open things and lots of spinning beach balls etc. Its a quad core i7.

When this happens activity monitor says the CPU is 96% idle. Very frustrating. We downloaded Onyx and scanned it, but it indicated that all is well. Any suggestions? Go back to SL possibly?

Liameter

In my experience the spinning beach ball occurs when the OS is busy trying to access the Hard Drive. Maybe the new drive has problems.

Sad Professor

OnyX is useless and won't tell you anything. In fact it can do a lot of harm. Verify the disk and repair permissions using Disk Utility (in Utilities folder).

ratsam

Is your system software on the SSD...?? If so it could be that Trim is not enabled on the SSD. SSD's work in a different way to traditional spinning Hard drives in how data is deleted from them... Probably best you have a read of this than me trying to explain it to ye... http://www.tuaw.com/2011/03/27/keeping-ssds-in-trim-doing-the-math.

To enable trim just download this little app from Groths.... http://www.groths.org/?page_id=322

Hope that helps

Rats

7upfree

ratsam wrote: »

Is your system software on the SSD...?? If so it could be that Trim is not enabled on the SSD. SSD's work in a different way to traditional spinning Hard drives in how data is deleted from them... Probably best you have a read of this than me trying to explain it to ye... http://www.tuaw.com/2011/03/27/keeping-ssds-in-trim-doing-the-math.

To enable trim just download this little app from Groths.... http://www.groths.org/?page_id=322

Hope that helps

Rats

Thanks for that! We've done everything. An hour on the phone to Apple deleting caches, launch agents, etc. No real difference. MonitoringActivity monitor reveals that while we could operate Parallels with SL installed, ML is a far greater demand on RAM.

With Parallels running it's guzzling 4.2GB of wired RAM, and when that's added to Mac OS we're left with very little available RAM.

Safari was also crawling, but a quick Google recommended setting the MTU to Jumbo and its now running instead of walking. Disabling Dashboard in Terminal also produced a vast improvement, but it would appear that we need to at least DOUBLE the RAM.

We're assuming that when the drive was installed in CompuB that trim would have been enabled?

Colonel Panic

Trim isn't supported by Apple on drives the computer didn't ship with and likely NOT the cause of your problem. CompuB would get a paddlin' if they used a hack to enable it.

ratsam

Whilst Trim is not officially supported by Apple on new drives it is available through the link I provided. It can be enabled and disabled as you wish and technically I wouldn't exactly call it a hack...! Anyway it's likely not the problem but you have nothing to loose trying!

Ram is very cheap at the moment and you'll likely be able to double your ram without taking too much of a financial hit. Try over here... http://www.crucial.com/eu/store/drammemory.aspx or here http://www.mrmemory.co.uk for cheap reliable RAM...! I've used both.

Rats

Graham

I'd second the additional RAM suggestion from RATSAM, I think you can fit up-to 32GB into an i7 iMac.