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  • Macbook shows up spinning wheel or freezes frequently May 18 @ 1:07 PM

    My Macbook (2007) Intel Core 2 Duo has been showing the spinning wheel very frequently recently. When I open up the Activity monitory, the current application shows up as "Not responding" (the current application can be anything from Safari, Word, Powerpoint, Preview,...) when the wheel is spinning. I suspected memory to be a problem so I upgraded to 2GB from the earlier 1GB. (the free memory is around 1.5 GB normally now). I did not see any difference. Sometimes, when I put it to sleep and "wake" it up again several hours later by opening the lid, it does not respond at all, or immediately shows up the spinning wheel. I then have to perform a hard reboot to get the mac to respond again. I have even reformatted and reinstalled my Mac recently. I don't have a whole lot of applications as well (in addition to whatever I got with the Macbook, I have Office for Mac, a plotting software, Skype, and may be a couple others).

    I am really having a hard time figuring out what the problem is, and it is really frustrating to get the spinning wheel when I am working.

    Any pointers greatly appreciated?

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Replies

  • Re: Macbook shows up spinning wheel or freezes frequently Jun 27 @ 10:06 PM

    All,

    Just thought I'd update you on this thread. I tried several other suggestions from various other discussion forums. Nothing seemed to work. I almost had reached the point of trashing my laptop when I decided to change my hard drive. Lo an behold...I have been "spinning wheel" free ever since (knock on wood). It appears that there was some problem with the hard disk that Disk Utility could not catch.

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  • Re: Macbook shows up spinning wheel or freezes frequently May 21 @ 6:01 PM

    Sarabian,

    I repaired disk permissions as you suggested. Although it corrected several permissions, it still showed up the spinning wheel and froze intermittently. After waiting a couple of days, I tried the next solution. I successfully repaired the disk (Disk Utility did find a minor volume block error and corrected it successfully). Unfortunately, within 10-15 minutes after I did this, it started to show up the wheel again. Do you have other things that I can try?

    Sunrisetech, I tried the smart ultility (free trial), and my disk came clean. This was before I used the Disk Utility on the Mac OS disk.

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