MAC users come in

[Pilsy]

I have a MacBook and have always heard anti-virus software is pretty much useless on a Mac, as nobody writes viruses targeting Macs. (Of course, my thought has been that someone will, eventually.)

Do you have many windows open? Lots of tabs in your browser? I've been seeing the little pinwheel more often lately, but I have oodles open and blame it on that.

[mayflowers22]

I don't have one, I didn't think you needed one for a Mac. How old is your mac?

[dexteroni]

I thought this was going to be about MAC makeup. lol. No, we don't have anti-virus on our Macs.

Three tabs is nothing; if you're getting the pinwheel with three tabs the problem lies elsewhere. Is your Mac old? Or is your hard drive overly full?

[Pilsy]

I agree that three tabs =/= the problem. Sorry I can't be more helpful. Have you restarted? I view that as a panacea.

[mayflowers22]

Have you downloaded a lot?

[dexteroni]

Oh, huh. If you've googled "what to try when you get the pinwheel" and none of those things have worked, then you might have to take it to the genius bar. Hopefully whatever it is will be covered by Applecare. And if you end up taking it in, I strongly advise getting in there before this Friday when the new iPhones arrive in the stores.

[heygrey]

we have 3 macbooks, none of them have anti-virus programs.

when things start running slow i head to the hard drive and start deleting files. that usually speeds things up a lot. at around the 5 year mark, i wiped my computer clean and started over again. it ran like it did the first day i bought it. you shouldn't have to do that after only a year though.

turn off any programs that run at start-up. the less there is running in the background, the quicker your internet searching will be.

if it's just the internet that's slow, but other programs are still loading and moving fast it could be your internet connection. since we're on wireless if the connection is weak the internet will move at a snails pace, but i could be running my entire adobe suite perfectly fine.

[nsl]

You've probably already tried this, but whenever my MacBook starts running slow I reboot. Presto!

[rubytue]

Sept 15, 2012 12:37:55 GMT -5 dexteroni said:

I thought this was going to be about MAC makeup. lol.

Me, too :-( I was hoping someone had a rocking discount code or something. Then again, that should probably be on MM makeup, which I don't read (b/c I don't experiment with products enough)

[Deleted]

Sometimes a reboot isn't enough. Sometimes you actually need to turn it off and let it stay off for a while. My iMac will give me the pinwheel when I don't turn it off nightly and then just turning it off and leaving it off for a while will help a lot.

[mrst2]

I had a virus on my Macbook once. I use Sophos Anti-virus.

[Redpoppy]

Mine does that when I get to 10 GB or less on my hard drive, which I'm quickly approaching again after taking all videos and music off it a year ago. Rebooting helped a bit but only temporarily. I'm going to wait for the new iMacs and hopefully move from a laptop to a desktop.

[smock]

What percent of your hard drive is empty? Computers tend to run faster with at least 25-30% unused on the hard drive.

[sessy]

If it's less than a year old I would take it into the store. Even without apple care it's under warranty for the first year. I've never use any ant-virus software on my computer.

[315bride]

Another vote for checking your activity monitor to see what's sucking up the energy, so to speak.

I don't have antivirus software. Its rare to get one.

I have other suggestions but honestly the genius bar is always so helpful for me. I recently had an issue that I couldn't fix myself on my 3+ yr old MacBook and they essentially wiped my hard drive and then reinstalled the OS. Took care of it. It did help that I regularly back up my data. Made it so easy for me.

[liveintheville]

Download.com and look for free anti virus software. iAntivirus is one.

You could try running disk utility to check for data corruption or permissions issues.

[sarahsas]

I have a new Macbook Pro and I have avast! antivirus on mine. It's from work, so they loaded it.