Most people are looking to have a faster operating system.
Which is why I was more than a little concerned when the dreaded spinning beach ball (Max OS X’s progress indicator) was appearing with somewhat frightening regularity lately.
The slowdown was fairly global, but was especially noticeably in Mail as I was entering email addresses. Like most email applications, Mail lets you enter just the first few letters of an email address, and then auto-completes it if it’s one that you’ve used before. Unfortunately in my case, Mail was taking tens of seconds or longer to find matches.
Then I happened to check my Energy-saving preferences. Lo and behold, “put hard disk to sleep when possible” was checked. I know I didn’t check it, so it must have been the update to Mac OS X 10.4.4 that reset this preference:
I’m sure this is only one of many possibilities, but if your Mac is slow lately … you might want to check this preference.
I always have that item checked but I don’t see the spinning beach ball that much. Perhaps it was just coincidence?
You would see that spinning beach ball – depends on how many external Hard Drives you have, how quickly they wake up, what kind of external case you have, what port they are connected to (USB, Firewire 400 or Firewire 800, or SATA). etc..
It all depends…