Paul, Control-Click, choose Options->Remove From Dock to get it out of the dock.
Try the solution posted by iMerlin here.
The one time I had beachball issues, it was faulty RAM, but that was also accompanied by the occasional kernel panic, and you didn’t mention anything about that. Sometimes, peeking into Console (Finder > Go > Utilties > Console) and looking at the logs when the problem is occurring might give you a clue as to what’s going on, as well as looking at Activity Monitor (or “top” from the Terminal) to see what’s hogging up your processor.
Or just drag it into space and watch it go poof.
There’s your problem right there. I jumped from 2gb to 6gb and the thing (Mac Pro 1.1) now runs like a train.
I read a lot of .pdf documents. The Preview pdf views is ridiculously slow at searching and Acrobat viewer from Adobe will go slower and slower over the time of a day or two. I think there is a memory leak. In the end I have to reopen it. Firefox has a really irritating bug, that when you have the save dialogue open, and some other dialogue opens for some reason, the two blocks for each other and there’s no way out but to reboot.
Oh, not really Mac OS related, but I cannot get Civ V or Medal of Honor Special Ops to work with my wonky internet connection and that ‘Steam’ thing. (Well Civ is due to an old graphics card.) But it is less fun to use a Mac nowadays.
I also have noticed that Safari is a pig these days on my iMac running Snow Leopard.
I know that the problem is likely related to my 2GB of memory, but I never seem to get around to buying more memory. I’m sure it will simply fly once I do.
It’s very annoying when I open Safari and go to a site and watch as the spinning beach ball comes on, so that the site can load Flash and show me an advertisement. Even if I block them, some slip through, and that’s enough to bog down the system.
Yeah…I ought to spring for that extra memory soon.
Alt-space “Terminal” – and if necessary, ps -A | grep “program-name”
You might try different levels of capital letters. Then “kill” or “killall” will be your friend.
One shouldn’t ever have to do this on a Macintosh, but then there’s this company called CCP that uses a compatibility layer called Cider to publish a game called Eve Online that makes me resort to this crap more than I like to admit.
Well, this thread made me bite the bullet.
I hopped over to Crucial, ran their CrucialMacScanner app, and ordered the max memory for my machine (2x2GB).
It came out to a little over 70 bucks with tax, so it wasn’t as painful as I expected. I’m tired of this annoying sluggishness.
I notice that FireFox has become quite sluggish these days. There are a lot of browsers that are quicker. I’m thinking of doubling my RAM as well. 16 GiB ought to be enough…