Speaking of patience…
Please, for the love of Jobs, give your Mac some time to think! The beach ball means it’s processing, so just give it a moment.
If you open the wrong application, wait until it launches fully before doing a normal and healthy Quit. No need to Force Quit. If everything is feeling sluggish, quit your open applications, give them time to close, then restart. Force Quit can interrupt read/write processes on the disk, which can lead to file corruption and partial files written to disk.
When you get an error message, slow down and read it… They’re usually quite helpful and descriptive.
It’s like driving. If you take a wrong turn, you don’t slam on the brakes, drive up on the curb to do a u-turn, and head back. You recalibrate and take the next turn. If you are talking with someone you wouldn’t cut them off mid-sentence and dismiss what they’re saying with the equivalent of pressing “Ok” or “Cancel”.
Macs have feelings too. 🙂
That being said, if you’re getting the beach ball for a minute at a time while accessing certain files or folders, that can be a sign of bad blocks on your hard drive. Also, if applications hang consistently when doing certain tasks, you can look into deleting cache files, recreating preferences, or testing with different files.
