[jeff k]

I seem to see the beachball (pinwheel) quite a bit. Mabye it's a hazy memory, but I don't seem to remember so much waiting or freezing in OS9, is anyone with me on this? Any explanations? thanks!

[DeathMan]

what hardware are you running?

when you get the beachball in one app, can you still switch over to other apps?

I remember getting the little spinning cd/watch in os9 a lot. plus if you were waiting for photoshop to run a filter thats what you were doing until it got done. not so with os x. maybe you get the ball a lot, but that doesn't mean you have to sit there. (but there is no way for us to know how much is normal for you since we don't know your hardware specs.

[Rinpoche]

maybe i'm just crazy, but i've been seeing that damned beachball more since updating to 10.2.4.

[jeff k]

I'm on OS 10.2.4 -- 768 ram
When I get beachball, you cannot do anything.
My hard drive had bad blocks. I just fixed it, though I'm not sure if this had to do with beachball.

[Angus_D]

The beachball is invoked by the windowserver if the foreground app stops responding to events for more than about 3 seconds or so. You can probably still switch to other applications and do stuff.