I have a four year old Mac Book Pro. When I see the spinning beach ball for extended time (2-3 minutes), I do a restart. Then follow it with a Permission Repair.
The permission repair is always full of Permissions Repaired "Library/Printers/Epson. Every time. I have never connected a printer to the Mac Book. Why is it always repairing these permissions?
First of all, you need to figure out why your machine is hanging. Doing a forced reboot on a regular basis isn’t a great idea.
Secondly, stop doing permissions repair. It’s mostly voodoo, and a force reboot won’t change permissions. The reason that it’s complaining about the Epson driver is because the receipt for it is wrong. It’s just a cosmetic issue.
Use Activity Monitor to see what’s hogging your processor cycles the next time you beachball.
Do an fsck.
Gracias troopers!
What is a fsck?
File System Consistency Check.
Basically, it’s running Disk Utility -> Repair Disk.
But, I doubt that’s going to fix anything.
What OS are you using?
What are you Mac Book Pro specs?
What applications/programs were you running at the time?
As beowulff said—the Epson printer permissions is not a big deal. It’s a file that is in your system preferences (pre-loaded).
Have you ever used Onyx? It’s good for running the necessary scripts. Your Mac should usually run a daily script, a weekly script, and a monthly. If your Mac is shut down when those scripts normally run, then they won’t run. I think the daily one does when you boot up. Onyx is a free application and you can manually run those scripts.
Have you ever run a disk utility (i.e., TechTool Pro or Drive Genius) on your system? It’s nice to have one of those (they are not that expensive).
You can also try to create a new user account and see what happens. If things are okay, then we will know it’s definitely a bad preference file somewhere causing the spinning beachball.
Another vote for Onyx. Clearing the font cache usually helps in my case - I open and close a lot of fonts in my job.
Just reiterate: the beachball does not necessarily imply that the whole system has frozen - it’s really just a “foreground app is not responding” indicator. When it occurs, have you tried switching to a different program, launching Activity Monitor or Console, or force-quitting the foreground app?
One possibility on a four-year old machine is that your hard drive is failing. If the machine isn’t completely freezing, identifying messages will probably appear in Console.
My iMac does that too, with those same folders, and I have no problems with it. So whatever the cause, I’m sure it has nothing to do with your problem.