Mac hangs, beachball for less than a minute

[wonderboy00]

Hi everyone. Yup, my first post, and I searched but haven't been able to find answers anywhere to this (somewhat minor) problem.

OK, just randomly one day I was using Word to do some coursework, and my Mac started hanging for about 10-40 seconds at a time, during which the beachball would spin. It does it in Firefox too, whether I'm just browsing, watching movies, etc... also does it when I play games. I think it only happens when I'm running applications, but I'm never running many at the same time. Even if I am just running one window of Firefox, it can happen. It generally happens about once every 5 minutes or so, sometimes more frequently, sometimes less.

I'm not sure what other information would help. Every once in a while it beeps, but it is not the 'three-beep-shutdown' thing that happens on some Macs. I can usually hear the hard drive starting to spin before it stops hanging, but it doesn't always stop hanging right after I hear it spin. It is pretty much a random hang where the beachball spins, but my computer doesn't shut down or anything too terrible, I just have to wait for a while. I am afraid that this will turn into a bigger problem or something... plus it is just plain annoying.

Specs: iMac with 150 GB HD, 89 GB free, no external drives, 1 GB ram, 1.8 GHz Intel Core Duo processor, OSX 10.5.5.

Thanks for any help or advice, or direct me to another thread if it deals with this problem. Let me know if more info is needed.

[Doctor X]

The Gurus can tell you if you can increase your RAM, but have you run maintenance scripts?

Onyx is a free ware and Cocktail is an inexpensive shareware. Both work well to clean things up. Note that if you repair permissions on 10.5.5 it . . . will . . . take . . . a . . . long . . . tiiiiimmmmmeeeee. . . .

--J.D.

[Doctor X]

. . . using my MacTracker . . . assuming I got your machine correct: iMac Early 2006 17-inch . . . 1.83 GHz Intel Core Due (T2400) ("Yonah") . . . it can take 2 Gig of RAM. Anyways, I would still run the scripts and then consider maxing your RAM.

--J.D.

[wonderboy00]

Thanks very much Doctor X. I downloaded Onyx, and almost immediately it told me I had to clean up my hard drive using my Leopard disc. So... I did... and pretty quickly again the problem appeared once more. I realized that my hard drive was giving out, but I didn't manage to save much data before the end came . But, that's OK, I have a brand spankin' new 250 GB HD that I just put in myself (I am praying and chanting to Tara that I didn't screw anything up in there), and everything seems fine. Thanks for the help!

[stilbite]

... and the lesson here is?.. Back up.. Back UP.. BACK UP! With Time Machine you now have NO EXCUSES whatsoever.. it is a dream.