Beach Ball On Mac Won't Stop Spinning On Notes App

Beach Ball On Mac Won't Stop Spinning On Notes App Average ratng: 4,1/5 5215 reviews

Apr 25, 2017  Select the app you need to reset from the list. Click on the small arrow next to the application icon. Click Applications Reset. If the beach ball keeps rolling when you use the app again, reinstall it completely by pressing Uninstall instead or Reset. Force quit the active app. To determine whether the spinning wheel of death is the result of a single app, click off of it onto the Mac desktop and force quit the app. Restart it again, and there may be no problem. There's a good chance, though, that you'll see the spinning pinwheel again with that app. Shut down the Mac.

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  1. People call it the Spinning Beach Ball of Death, or the Rainbow Wheel. Wikipedia calls it the Spinning Pinwheel, and the official name for it is the Spinning Wait Cursor. Either way, if you’ve got a slow Mac, you’ll be seeing that beach ball quite a bit — and you don’t even get a suntan to go with it. The Spinning Beach Ball of Death.
  2. Why do I get the spinning beach ball twice upon each save in a word document, which are about 4 seconds apart from each beach ball spin? Actually, it may have started after updating software to 'macOS Sierra Version 10.12.1.' Original title: Word for Mac.

Few things give Mac users that sinking feeling more than the sight of a spinning color wheel, rainbow wheel, spinning beach ball of death or SBBOD as it's also commonly known. It’s official name is the Spinning Wait Cursor, and it’s a system indicator. signifies that macOS cannot handle all the tasks given to it at this moment.

Why does it happen? It's a sign that an application is trying to deal with more processes than it can handle at any given time. Sometimes it will last only a few seconds and disappear, when processing cycles are freed up and the application is able to process all the tasks it needs to. Other times, the application will become persistently unresponsive and 'hang'. When that happens, the only solution is to force quit the app.

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Quick ways to stop spinning wheel

To fix an application stuck with a spinning cursor:

  1. If and get rid of a spinning ballyou know which app is hanging, press Cmd-alt-escape and you'll see the Force Quit dialog box. The problematic app will be shown as 'not responding.'
  2. Select the app and press Force Quit. The app should now quit and the rainbow wheel will disappear.
  3. If the app refuses to force quit, or force quitting doesn't fix the problem, the next step is to restart your Mac.

How to stop the rainbow wheel issue

Getting rid of a spinning beachball is only part of the solution. As we said above, it's a symptom, not a cause of problems. Fortunately, there are a number of things you can do to prevent it. The first is to identify which applications are putting the greatest strain on your Mac.

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iStatMenus, available in Setapp, is a powerful performance monitoring tools for your Mac. It sits in your Mac's Finder menu bar and allows you to easily check which apps are hogging processor cycles or RAM. And helps you see how well or badly your Mac is running. If you need more detailed information, or need to quit specific processes (rather than applications), you can launch Activity Monitor from within iStatMenus.

The combination of iStatMenus and Activity Monitor will lead you to the apps that are overloading your Mac. The next step is to uninstall them completely and reinstall them, making sure you remove all the temporary and preference files associated with it.

The easiest way to do that is to use CleanMyMac, also available in Setapp. Here's what you should do.

Uninstall apps and extensions

  1. Launch Setapp and search for CleanMyMac. Click install and wait for it to install and launch.
  2. Look in the sidebar for the Application section and click Uninstaller. The window on the right will fill up with all the apps you have installed on your Mac. Find the one you want to uninstall and click on the checkbox next to it. Click Uninstall at the bottom of the main window.

It's a good idea to remove any apps you don't use. You'll free up disk space and could prevent conflicts with other apps.

Re-index Spotlight

Spotlight is and incredibly useful tool for searching for files on your Mac, among many other things. In order to search your Mac, Spotlight needs to build and maintain an index. Occasionally that index can be come corrupt and when that happens, the dreaded spinning color wheel is likely to appear. Here's how to fix it.

  1. In CleanMyMac, click on the Maintenance in the left sidebar.
  2. Click the checkbox next to Reindex Spotlight.
  3. Click Run.

Free up disk space

macOS uses your startup disk to host virtual RAM and then regularly reads and writes files to it. If you don't have enough free space (at least 10% of the disk's total capacity), your Mac will struggle noticeably and you'll see the spinning beachball more often.

To free up disk space, you can either manually trawl through your startup disk backing up important files and then deleting them, or use Get Backup Pro or ChronoSync Express to back up the disk and then use CleanMyMac to free up disk space. It's a good idea to use Disk Drill to analyse the disk and identify which files are taking up the most space. Disk Drill and ChronoSync Express are available in Setapp.

  1. In CleanMyMac, click on Smart Scan and then click Scan.
  2. Wait for it to finish, then click on each section in turn and click Review Details.

The results can be enlightening. For example, we found that cache files for the Photos app were taking up 8GB space on our Mac. Uncheck and items you don't want to remove and then click Clean. Repeat for the other categories.

For more information on how to free up space on your Mac, we prepare these quick tips.

Install more RAM

If none of the the above, there is one final thing you can try. As we mentioned above, the spinning beachball can appear when your Mac is using virtual memory and storage space is limited. The more physical RAM you have, the less your Mac will need to resort to virtual memory.

Notes

So, installing more RAM will mean you see the spinning color wheel less often. Unfortunately, it's not as easy as it used to be to add more RAM to your Mac. You'll probably need to visit an Apple Store or an authorised service centre and ask them to install it for you.

To prevent that happening in the future, it's worth installing as much RAM as your Mac can take, or as much as you can afford, when you first buy it. Money spent on RAM is never wasted and usually means your Mac will perform better for longer, before you eventually need to replace it.

The good news is that replacing RAM is very much a last resort and that the other steps described above will, in many cases, solve the problem completely.

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Beach Ball On Mac Won't Stop Spinning On Notes App Free

The rainbow-colored circle is a painful sight to see for Mac users. If you’re lucky it disappears in a few seconds, but more often it remains for minutes, leaving you helplessly locked out of the app or your whole Mac. Since it’s not always clear how to deal with with the wheeling cursor or what caused it in the first place, let’s break it all down. In this article we’ll take a look at what is the spinning beach ball, why and when it shows up, and what you can do about it.

What is a spinning color wheel?

Initially, it’s a system indicator. It’s official name is the Spinning Wait Cursor, not so official — the Spinning Beach Ball of Death or SBBOD. The ball signifies that your Mac cannot handle all the tasks given to it at this moment.

Every app on your Mac has a so-called window server. When an app receives more events than it can process, the window server automatically shows you the spinning ball. It usually takes about 4 seconds for the app to decide that it’s non-responsive.

Why does the Mac spinning wheel of death appear?

Well, the reasons are countless. First, it can be a stand-alone issue with a certain app. Second, it could be faulty hardware or insufficient RAM. We’ll go over each possible issue and see how it can be fixed, depending on the cause. Sometimes, the only way out it getting a new Mac, but most of the cases can be fixed with the right software or system commands.

How to stop the spinning ball on Mac?

In case you just need unlock one frozen application, that’s a job for Force Quit.

To fix an application stuck with a spinning cursor right now:

  1. Click the Apple icon in the top left corner.
  2. Choose Force Quit (or press cmd+alt+esc).
  3. Select the app that won’t respond.
  4. Click Force Quit.

Simply shutting down the process is a brutal way of problem solving and it doesn’t address the issue that caused the freezing. It could have been an accidental glitch in the program, but if it keeps freezing or spreads further to other software and services, you need to look deeper.

What if the application keeps freezing when you open it again?

Reset or reinstall the freezing application. Macs don’t have a proper uninstaller and moving applications to the Trash bin leaves plenty of app leftovers. Some of them could be the reason why the spinning wheel showed up, so if you leave them the issue will stay.

How to reset a Mac app to its default settings or uninstall it

There are two ways to reset apps: one would be to use application’s own preferences or settings and look for reset options there. But in case the app won’t let you do that (because it keeps freezing), you can turn to third-party solutions, like CleanMyMac X for instance. It’s a handy app for Mac maintenance and cleaning with plenty of useful tools, including reset and uninstallation.

  1. Download CleanMyMac X, an app for Mac maintenance.
  2. Open it and click on the Uninstaller.
  3. Select the app you need to reset from the list.
  4. Click on the small arrow next to the application icon
  5. Click Applications Reset.

If the beach ball keeps rolling when you use the app again, reinstall it completely by pressing Uninstall instead or Reset. Remember, simply moving the app to the Trash doesn’t do the trick, since its leftover files remain on your hard drive.

Important: if you have a licence for the paid app, makes sure to save the number somewhere.

What if your whole Mac becomes unresponsive?

Possible issue: Overworked processor

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One of the reasons for the wheel to show up could be that your Mac is getting old. You can figure out if that’s the case by checking the CPU usage. To check the CPU usage, turn to Activity monitor. Find it in the Applications/Utilities folder or run a Spotlight search. Or, if you have CleanMyMac X, use it’s Menu in the top bar.

The bottom table shows System load in percentage. If it’s way above 50% and remains there for long, especially without any specific reason like games or heavy rendering programs, this might be the signal your processor is the bottleneck.

Fix: If your processor is overworking regularly, only buying a new Mac will fix the problem entirely. Sorry.

Possible issue: Low disk space

You don’t even need to have a full startup disk to see the nasty ball. Just a heavily loaded hard drive, with lots of large files can already cause troubles with loading.

Fix: Hard drive cleanup. Thankfully, that’s an easy task. You can get CleanMyMac X and in free up tons of space in a few minutes. With CleanMyMac you don’t need to dig into folders and look for files you don’t need, the app will find and sort them, plus all the system junk your Mac has been accumulating for months.

Possible issue: Insufficient RAM

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Another possible hardware issue is insufficient Random Access Memory. To figure out if you need more RAM, open the Activity Monitor again. It’s in the Applications/Utilities folder. In the Memory tab, you can see Memory pressure table with a graph. If the graph is red and your memory is constantly strained under all the running apps, you’ve found the problem.

Fix: You can upgrade RAM by buying and installing more of it. It’s usually enough to have 8 GB for most tasks and applications, apart from heavy video rendering and the likes. Here’s a detailed guide on how to upgrade RAM on Mac.

Beach Ball On Mac Won't Stop

That’s about it concerning the spinning beach ball and how to deal with it. We hope this guide has been of help and you’ll stop the spinning wheel of death on your Mac once and for all.

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