keep drive spinning all the time windows

#Keep drive spinning all the time windows upgrade#
#Keep drive spinning all the time windows software#
#Keep drive spinning all the time windows free#
#Keep drive spinning all the time windows mac#

Clicking on Stop in this alert should end the problem (though the page may then render incorrectly). Most browsers recognize this situation and open an alert window stating that a script is slowing the browser. The SBBOD may also appear when you load a Web page containing a vast amount of data or a JavaScript that is either inefficient or incompatible. Otherwise, press and hold the power button to shut down the Mac, restart, then open the system log in Console (/Applications/Utilities) to see if you can determine the cause.

#Keep drive spinning all the time windows mac#

In that case, try to shut down or restart the Mac by pressing Command-Eject or Command-Control-Eject, respectively. If you are able to switch to other applications and the SBBOD appears in all of them, that could be a sign that one of your Mac’s system process is hung. Don’t quit processes whose User is root: Those are system processes, and terminating them may cause your Mac to freeze, requiring a restart.

If you recognize the process-if, for example, it’s an application you know you opened-select it, click on Quit Process, then click on either Quit or Force Quit.

#Keep drive spinning all the time windows software#

To find out which software processes are hogging CPU cycles, sort by Activity Monitor’s % CPU column.A frozen process will appear here in red text, with the words Not Responding next to its name. While you’re waiting, you can find out which apps are hogging more than their fair share of system resources: Open Activity Monitor’s CPU tab and sort by the % CPU column in descending order the apps at the top are the ones using the most CPU cycles. If you suspect that the SBBOD is software-based, the first thing to do is simply to wait for a few minutes to see if the app starts responding again or crashes. Clearly, the more resource-intensive apps you work with daily, the fewer you should run simultaneously. If upgrading isn’t an option for you, you’re just going to have to run fewer applications concurrently.

#Keep drive spinning all the time windows upgrade#

If it’s the RAM or the hard drive, you can upgrade those individually. In the case of the CPU, however, that means buying a new Mac. If you can isolate a hardware cause, the solution is obvious: You need to upgrade. In the pie charts shown in these panes, more green is better. Again, you can use Activity Monitor to diagnose RAM and hard drive shortages open the System Memory or Disk Usage tabs.

#Keep drive spinning all the time windows free#

As a rule of thumb, keep at least 10GB free on your startup disk. Again, that leads to more CPU cycles devoted to swapping and more beach balls. Similarly, if your startup disk is nearly full, less space is available for swap files. That’s why you want as much RAM as your budget will allow and your Mac can accommodate. If apps can’t get the CPU time they want, the beach ball appears. Insufficient RAM means more paging and swapping, which means fewer CPU cycles are available to apps. Virtual memory paging and swapping (freeing RAM by moving data to swap files on disk and back) consumes CPU cycles. The beach ball may also appear if you don’t have enough RAM. That will place a small activity graph in the corner of your screen. You can also Control-click on the icon and select Monitors -> CPU Usage, or Monitors -> Floating CPU Window. That will turn the icon itself into a CPU usage graph you can then close the main Activity Monitor window. For example, open Activity Monitor then Control-click on its Dock icon and select Dock Icon -> Show CPU Usage.

You don’t have to keep an Activity Monitor window open all the time there are less obtrusive ways to use it. To find out if the CPU is a bottleneck on performance, use Activity Monitor (/Applications/Utilities) to monitor CPU usage.