New Mac users forum: Color circle

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spinning_wait_cursor

It appears that I need more ram. I thought the salesman knew what my needs were. It appearsthat I have only 384 ram. Thanks for the help.

with that small amount of RAM, you either have an older Mac or you have misread/mistyped the RAM details

Most new Mac's come with at least 2GB of RAM

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At the top left of the screen, under the Apple, you will find "About this Mac"
Click it and the next little window will tell you what your OS version is and how much memory you have installed.

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I have a MacBook Pro, 13" Early 2011
Processor 2.3 GHz Intel core i5
<div>Software Mac OS X Lion Version 10.7.3 (11D50b)
Graphic Intel HD Graphic 3000 384 Ram
I hit the memory button and Wow
4 GB installed 2 slots each accepts 1333 MHz DDR3
All slots in use

I was reading the 384 in Graphic. This really helped alot for me to understand what I have. Thank you
Well, I still don't know why the "Spinning Wheel of Death". I downloaded Gemeni to check the duplicates. Hope that helps. What about C Mac Cleaner?

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which are not really worth the bandwidth they take up when you download them.

The colored wheel indicates that the machine is busy, not necessarily stuck, and should return to life shortly.

Can be caused by lack of RAM(probably not in this case) or a full hard drive(how much free space do you have on your internal drive?)

Go back to the Apple menu and the About this Mac.
This time, click on the More Info button.
In there you will find just about everything you need to know and, more importantly, it will tell you what size your HD is and how much space there is available on it.

Share that and we'll go from there

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I did as you asked. I have clicked on all the listed items. The only thing I think it may be is the info in Serial ATA. Let me know if that is so. You have been such a big help. Thank you again.

and, if you are running OS X 10.7.x (Lion) you could just click on the Storage option and it will show you, graphically, what you need to know


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282 GB out of 319GB. Does that make any sense. thank you again.

and that rules out the lack of hard drive space.

Next question would be, how many applications do you have running at the same time?

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I don't think I have more than one at a time. I close all my windows when I am using an app. There are more than one window open when i do my mail and some research.

do you have running at the same time.

That is not the same as How many windows do you have open at the same time"

On a Mac, unlike Windows, closing an applications window by using the Red dot at the top left of the window, does not cause the application to Quit.
It just closes the window, the application is still running and eating up your RAM.

Take a look at the dock, notice that under some of the icons there is a little black triangle or a white mark?
You will always see one under the Finder face, first on the left hand end of the dock, and one under each of the applications that you have running.

Launch Mail and Safari and you'll see those marks appear. Now close the Safari window. Note that the mark is still there. Safari is still running.

Next time the beach ball appears, see how many apps you have running.

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