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I’m surprised that this is still an issue. This is just a reminder that you will drastically slow down your machine if you have a lot of icons on your desktop. I’m running a 2.4 GHZ machine with 4 GB of RAM installed, and applications like Safari 3.1 and Firefox beta 5 would still beachball on almost no CPU load. (I use the wonderful tool MenuMeters to constantly monitor my CPU usage.) This is the latest operating system and some of the newest hardware, and yet it still sometimes feels slower than my old G5.

I had to remind myself that Apple still hasn’t fixed this bug yet, in fact they might have only made it worse with quick look (though I love quick look otherwise). Anyway, drag all of your icons except your hard drive to your documents folder, or at least a new folder on the desktop, and everything will become zippy again.

You’d think with plenty of CPU cycles to spare and memory to use that WindowServer would behave better. I think in the era of multi-core, multithreaded computing, applications that halt the entire system (beachballing) is the number one problem. OS X is rock solid in terms of crashing, but I think it should have better halting management, I guess you would call it.

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