• 13 NOV 2024

  • How to Fix the Spinning Beach Ball on Your Mac

  • blog_details

If you have ever worked on a Mac, you most probably have come across the infamous spinning beach ball-that little rainbow circle that comes up when your Mac is busy with something and can't respond right away. It is part of the normal experience with macOS, but it surely can get pretty annoying when it spins for too long. Here's a quick guide on how to solve the problem of the spinning beach ball and restore your Mac to good, smooth working order.

1. Wait It Out

Before jumping into troubleshooting, just let your Mac wait. The spinning beach ball shows when the system is working on something heavy, such as running a big program or opening up a website with heavy content. If in some time the ball vanishes, then all is well.

2. Force Quit Unresponsive Applications

Often, a frozen application or process means the beach ball spinning. If it won't go away, Force Quit the problem application by pressing.

How to do that: Open the window of Force Quit Applications by using Command + Option + Esc. Further, highlight the app that isn't responding and then click Force Quit. If you are not able to open this window, try holding down Command + Shift + Option + Esc for a few seconds to force quit.

3. Free Up System Resources

Sometimes, the spinning beach ball may appear when your Mac has too much load of applications and processes running.

How to do it: Open the Activity Monitor, launch from Applications > Utilities, and observe the list of processes. Kill any processes that are eating up a lot of CPU or memory-or simply quit the ones you don't need-and continue by going into freeing up disk space by removing files you no longer use or clear caches.

4. Check for Software Updates

The beach ball could be caused by some bug in the system or by some old software; therefore, make sure macOS and apps are up-to-date, as many times updates fix bugs and improve performance.

How to do it: Go to System Settings > Software Update and install any available updates. Update individual apps through the Mac App Store or directly via their respective websites.

5. Reboot Your Mac

If the spinning beach ball is continuing, often times a simple reboot will resolve many performance issues. Rebooting your Mac will clear temporary system files, close apps, and can just give your machine a fresh start.

How to do it: Tap the Apple logo in the top left and select Restart. After rebooting open application check, if the issue exists.

6. Run Disk Utility

Sometimes, corrupted files or a problematic hard drive can be the issue. It may show that the system displays slow performance and also shows up the spinning beach ball. It is sort-out-able if one goes for the running of utility to repair the disk.

How to do it: Open Applications > Utilities and then launch the Disk Utility app. Click on the option for the hard drive of your Mac and then click First Aid. After that, let this tool scan for errors on your disk and make the fixes necessary.

7. Hardware Issues

If you happen to get the beach ball all of the time, and your Mac acts like it is slow even after performing all of the above steps, then there might be a problem with the hardware. This could be your Mac's hard drive issue or its RAM.

How to do it: You can run Apple Diagnostics to check for hardware issues at the same time you restart your Mac, but immediately hold down the D key while it's booting up. That might detect a hardware issue that requires you to get your Mac serviced.

Conclusion

The spinning beach ball is actually a good indication that your Mac is hard at work, trying to process something, but when it comes up often, then it might be an indication of a greater issue. Using these troubleshooting steps, you'll be able to minimize its appearance and make sure that your Mac keeps running smoothly. Should you continue to have problems or if you feel unsure about performing repairs yourself, ComputerFixDallas is here for you. From software problems to hardware repairs, their specialist technicians will have your Mac up and running again in no time.

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