Spinning beach ball

[James Knight]

I know 448Mb is not the world's goods but there are no pageouts happening.
If I thought it would make a difference I would get more RAM. I've tried
erasing disk, updating drivers & doing a 100% clean install of 10.2.2 (and
earlier versions) plus iTunes 3.0.1 (and earlier) and Office X (with/without
updates). Nothing else at all. And still I can reproduce the problem
straight after a cold boot. So there is no fragmentation, disk problem or
privilege issue here. All I know is that the problem starts when I'm ripping
a CD and then try to use the internal HD eg when launching an app or when
Entourage tries to display an email. By the way - this is with a clean
install of Office and a new identity - no old databases are imported.

What I do find from using the Top command in the Terminal is that a process
is 'stuck' when I'm getting the beachball. I don't know which process though
- the display will say something like Processes: xx total, y running, 1
stuck. However the process list doesn't give me a clue as to which process
is stuck, whatever that means. If you can give me any pointers on this I
would be grateful.

Thanks for your ideas

James

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?