I have a 2 year old Macbook Pro. Recently, whenever a program accesses the disk, I get the spinning beach ball of death for 10-15 seconds. This happens, for instance, when I am attaching a photo to this post, or when I hit 'save' in a Microsoft Word document. It even happens the first time I create a new tab in Chrome/Safari, although I'm not sure why this would access the disk. It is not getting noticeably worse, but it is annoying enough to require action. I am not really a hardware / systems expert so it's possible this is not actually a disk problem, but other system resources seem to be OK.
I have tried:
- disk repair
- defragging
- killing hog processes via Activity Monitor (QuickLookHelper etc.)
- uninstalling Spotlight and replacing with Quicksilver
- changing energy settings, unchecking disk sleep etc
Nothing has worked. The next step seems to be to reinstall the HD?
Really not keen to do this as I have a gigantic amount of custom configs. Highly appreciate any help/advice. Here are some screenshots of system resources (each attached after enduring a 15 second spinning beachball of death!). Don't have enough reputation points to insert them directly.