Spinning beachball

[swf]

I know that this has probably been addressed hundreds of times, but I'm having difficulty with the Spinning Beachball of Death on an old machine(MacBook C2D, 2.4 Mhz, running 10.6.8, 4GB Ram) with a 256GB SSD that is less than 50% full.

This is my wife's computer that she has to keep at 10.6.8 due to the fact that she has hundreds of poems she wrote in AppleWorks and older versions of Word that cannot be opened without Rosetta. I have convinced her to begin translating them to Word 2011, but she is a long way from completion.

So, with all that said, her MacBook will freeze with the beachball spinning continuously. It doesn't seem to matter what she might be doing when it happens. She never has multiple programs operating simultaneously, so I can't image it is overtaxing the hardware. One time it may freeze while browsing in Firefox; another when in Mail, when translating to Word, or opening the Fitbit app. When the freeze occurs, it locks up everything; can't even Force Quit the application. The only option is to shut down and restart. This fixes the problem temporarily, but it recurs in short order.

I've tried a Safe Boot with no success. I ran TechTool Deluxe and it showed everything OK.
So, any ideas to solve the problem?

[bfd]

4GB RAM is not your friend here.

You might try a memory cleaner app like Memory Clean2…

https://fiplab.com

Free, and worth a try, but it'll only mask the symptoms. 12GB on an older MacPro here, and the demands of the system and current software were constantly dragging it down. While Memory Clean helped, OWC came to the rescue with 48GB of RAM. No more memory problems for now, but it's clear that's where part of the slowdown was coming from. Even now, the system and running apps are taking almost 20GB. 12GB was just spinning its wheels - and the colorful one as well. Lots of page outs before. None now.

[ka jowct]

Have you tried booting from an external drive? Any chance that the cable connecting the SSD to the motherboard could be damaged? That is a fairly common issue with some Mac laptops. If it runs OK from an external that would tell you where to start looking.

[Sarcany]

Could be malware. Unfortunately, there are no good malware scanners out there for 10.6.8. The old AdwareMedic app required 10.7.

...But you might make some headway with Etrecheck. It's not as comprehensive, but it's still very good. Only problem is that I dunno what the minimum requirements are on the latest upgrade. Worth a try, tho.
https://etrecheck.com

...Also, I believe that LibreOffice opens those docs.
https://www.libreoffice.org/

[jdc]

How about a different user?

4 GB is more than fine -- as we have 3 iMacs in the house (2007, 2008, 2009) all with 3 GB of ram and SSDs running El Cap just fine.

Not clear why there has to be "translation" if they are just word files?

Im assuming the poems dont have tables or fancy formatting or macros, right?

Give Libre Office a try? (free, open source)

[Sarcany]

jdc wrote:
Not clear why there has to be "translation" if they are just word files?

There are a bunch of weird Office file incompatibilities. Office 2011 won't open old resource-fork Mac files and will either report that the files are insecure or just that they can't be opened. Office 2016 won't open some Word for Mac files from 2004 and earlier.

[jdc]

Sarcany wrote:
[quote=jdc]
Not clear why there has to be "translation" if they are just word files?

There are a bunch of weird Office file incompatibilities. Office 2011 won't open old resource-fork Mac files and will either report that the files are insecure or just that they can't be opened. Office 2016 won't open some Word for Mac files from 2004 and earlier.
Good to know, as I was under the impression that was only for the goofy formatted stuff.

I only use Libre now, have for many, many years.

[Altered Horizons]

Launch Activity Monitor, select All Processes and sort by %CPU (high to low). Leave it running and when the beach balling starts, check for any process using excessive CPU.

Also, after a beach balling session, launch Console, select All Messages and check for any messages in that time frame. My sister had this type of problem with Sierra and Console showed a timeout problem with cloud syncing.

[jdc]

It’s 100% not malware.

[ka jowct]

jdc wrote:
It’s 100% not malware.

Malware would be at the bottom of my list of possible culprits. Given that it freezes in different apps, some sort of disc or cable problem seems more likely. Is TRIM enabled on the SSD?