[CUBE] Spinning beach ball

[Stephen Maris]

hmmmm. some ideas:
448Mb RAM is not that much any more. but pageouts are a good 
indication of not having enough.
the spinning ball doesn't mean the CPU is locked up, rather a 
process.  Usually it is a buggy program or extension that is at 
fault. One of the best ways to find out is using process viewer or in 
Unix "top -u", which will show you who is taking the most CPU...
I've had spinning balls in the finder, even though no process was 
taking much CPU time... It usually had to do with the network being 
tied up with sharing or something that it couldn't access any more. I 
simply restarted the finder.  In some cases, a clean reboot of the 
system is required!!!
I'm sure that I could tinker around in Unix for awhile and get things 
running right, but it's easier to just reboot everything, since there 
are so many system processes running in the background, you can't be 
sure which is giving you problems.
Have you run Apple's disk utility and privilege check?
Is the driver installed on your Hard disk up to date?
Try using the latest Norton on your hard disk.  You may find starting 
up in 9.2.2 and running Norton's speed disk will also help.
hope that helps, stephen

>On Monday, December 2, 2002, at 09:29  AM, James Knight wrote:
>
>>No, no paging is going on, I have 448Megs of RAM and various utilities (eg
>>Memory Stick, iPulse) show that more than half is free.
>>
>>So that's not it.
>>
>>I am using an external FireWire drive to rip to. But when launching an app
>>or doing anything else involving the internal drive, it all starts stalling.
>>
>>Thanks anyway
>>
>Intriguing problem then.  When's the last time you run a disk 
>diagnostic?  Like
>Norton's or something?  Maybe it's something as simple as fragmentation?