Pinwheel woes

mpittcasd
Contributor

I'm getting complaints from a few teachers that they get the pinwheel very frequently for just about any application they try to open. A majority of the time it seems like it is opening any of the Office applications (the first time being the worst, but still pinwheels after opening the first time), but can also happen with Safari or even opening a Finder window.

Our teachers have MBP mid-2012s with 4GB of RAM, so they're a little dated but not really that far off from what the new offerings have. I believe they are all on El Capitan now aside from a few people updating to Sierra on their own. Whenever I use the activity monitor on the computers I get to look at it doesn't appear that there is anything taxing the CPU or Memory even while the pinwheel appears.

For a short period it seemed that DiskWarrior rebuilding the directory helped out but even that's not doing much anymore. I've also pared down all of my JSS policies so there are very few that are ongoing/check-ins, and even those I limit to smart groups so they don't constantly run for all of our computers. Is there anything else I could look at to either on the computers or in the JSS somewhere that might give me a clue? I'm really not sure what else to do at this point.

4 REPLIES 4

sswartz
New Contributor III

that model (mid2012 MBP) seems to have very high rate of hd cable failure which then also sometimes seems to kill the hard drive, at least, in the experience of a number of schools in this area. It is most likely out of applecare, but you could try with your apple repair shop or just replace the cable yourself.

mpittcasd
Contributor

I have had a few cables go bad. I've also replaced a lot of hard drives but now I'm wondering if it might have just been the cables themselves. I'll see if I'm allowed to order one as a test. Do you know if it was a certain run of cables that might have been bad and getting a new one fixed the issue?

sswartz
New Contributor III

according to a number of online posts, the trouble is the cable wearing thin and shorting between the hard drive and the case.

mpittcasd
Contributor

Thanks for the info. I have a couple of Macbooks that met an untimely end so I'll start with those cables to see if it makes any difference.