color wheel

[emmalinesmom]

Hi, I am constantly getting the spining color wheel when using the computer. It spins for 5-10 seconds each time and then disappears. I got it two times when just trying to type these first two sentences. I have a G4, 400 MHz, 1 GB Ram. The spinning wheel pops up when I am just typing sentences in a document, just scrolling up or down a page, or right in the middle of playing a game. At first I thought it had something to do with my internet speed so I am now upgraded to 8 meg. Nothing has changed. I have tied emptying cache and using different browsers. Neither helped. It also takes about ten seconds to switch from tab to tab. Any ideas on what could be causing this. My brother-in-law switched our computer from a G3 to G4 and we never had this problem with the G3. He says the G4 should be faster but we never noticed a difference. It did not do this when he first switched the towers.

 

[Giaguara]

Which version of Mac OS X are you running?

How big is the hard drive, and how much empty space is there?
(There should be at least 15 % of the space free for the system to heal).

Do you run any system maintenance scripts or programs (like OnyX)?
When was the OS installed? (as in, when the Mac was bought or more recently?)

Did the slowness and beachball start gradually?

Do you have a lot (hundreds, or even more) fonts on that Mac?

Can you open Console application (/Applications/Utilities) and keep it running on the background, and when you get some particularly bad beachball episode, copy and paste what just got generated in the console? That would tell more about what the system was trying to do and if there were any errors.

There are a number of reasons why it can be slow and show the beachball.
It could be also that a 400 MHz G4 is quite slow for today's net standards - but I'm sure there are things we can have a look at and do before blaming just the processor for the speed. So maintenance programs, cleaning enough space on the drive, getting rid of unused, added fonts (if there are a lot of them) etc.