My 3 year old Mac has been locking up lately. Can you help me figure out why?

[iMore Question]

I have a 3 year old IMac which for the most part has worked flawlessly.

In the last several months it has begun to regularly lock up i.e. the little multi colored spinning wheel hits the page and I simply must allow it to runs its course since hitting escape or any other key seems to do little. Once or twice I have had to reboot Safari and even then the wheel returns.

I am pretty much a web browser doing little more on the computer than reading news stories, e-mail, etc. with ITunes playing in the background.

I do occasionally run a program called Sophos which checks for infected files and nothing has ever turned up.

Thanks in advance for any input.............

 

[pkcable]

Re: IMac

Might be time for some hardware diagnosis. I'm more of a PC guy, but does Mac have a program either built in or 3rd part which can detect and diagnose hardware issues? Look in Finder and Utilities would be my guess, but I am kind of new to Mac. (Just bought my MBP a month ago)

 

[Trees]

Re: IMac

Running diagnostics is a good suggestion. OS X Mountain Lion: Use Apple Diagnostics or Apple Hardware Test provides steps on how to run the diagnostics.

Checking in the Console app may help with software related concerns. Click on the All Messages, and then in the bottom right corner, click on the Now button. Doing so right after or during (if possible) when the spinning wheel occurs may help provide a clue if an app is crashing or other similar errors are occurring.

By chance when Sophos is running scans, does the spinning wheel happen? I ask only in the event that Sophos scan is consuming CPU and in turn creating a delay in processing other active apps like Safari.

Running Activity Monitor with the CPU option selected may also help. You can sort the output by %CPU usage, and by default I think the sort is from high to low. If an app or apps are consuming noticeably more than other apps while the spinning wheel occurs, then this could be an indication that one or more apps are consuming resources as noted above. Similarly, you can check out the other system resource tabs in Activity Monitor and see if anything jumps out that can be correlated with the spinning wheel.

Another area to check is if there are any updates available for your system. There could be an update available that may fix or help minimize the issue.

Beyond the above, its hard to provide specific guidance without more details. Hope the suggestions help narrow down what may be causing the problem.