Why is the Spinning beach ball showing on my Mac screen?! Well, the Spinning Wait Cursor, Spinning Beach Ball, Spinning Wheel of Death or whatever you decide to call it, is a pain for everyone. It occurs when a program cannot handle a request or is trying to perform extensive processes. Your mac constantly has a lot of functions running in the background and sometimes it just cannot handle it all at once. These steps below will show how to keep the spinning ball away from your screen.
Here’s how you can stop and prevent this from occurring.
- Turn the device off and back on. Sometimes it takes nothing more than to turn the device off and back on again. Leaving the Mac on continuously for days on end could lead to multiple processes running behind the scenes. By restarting the Mac, it gives it a chance to reboot.
- Close the tab/program with the Spinning Beach Ball showing. You can force quit any program by clicking the Apple logo in the top left of the screen and then force quit. Alternatively, you can use the keyboard shortcut: Option, Command and Esc (Escape).
If the Spinning Beach Ball continues to show:
- You might not have enough RAM on your device. This could be down to running extensive programs and not having enough RAM. You can purchase additional RAM online. Contact support@amsys.co.uk
- On an iMac, it could be down to a failing mechanical hard drive. Using spotlight search (press command and space), go into disk utility, select your drive and run first aid. Follow the steps shown on First Aid or contact support@amsys.co.uk
- If none of the above solve the issue, then you can try an OS archive reinstall. You can find how to perform an OS archive reinstall here.