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Kelmon

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Mar 28, 2005
725
0
United Kingdom
Hi Guys,

I've had this problem a few times recently and it's really starting to annoy me. Basically, my Late 2009 iMac will simply stop working. The screen is still displaying and I can move the cursor around as normal but nothing is actually responding. I've tried putting the system to sleep, which works but then I can't make it wake up. The only solution I've found is to turn the power off completely. It's like a kernel panic but without the actual kernel panic. If I was being suspicious I might think that Safari might have something to do with the problem as it is often an application that is open when the problem occurs. On the most recent occasion I was working in Outlook Web Access via VPN for work.

Any tips on how to go about diagnosing the root cause of the problem? Anyone else seen this?

Kelmon
 

Silvereel

macrumors 6502
Jan 19, 2010
349
1
I've had this problem a great deal. I spoke to Apple about it, and their suggestion was to relaunch the Mac in Recovery Mode, and repair permissions and HD through Disk Utility while still in Recovery. I did this a few days ago and no problems so far, but it's hard to say; it occurs pretty much randomly, so there's no way I can be sure that it's gone. If I can go over a week without a hiccup, I'll say it fixed it. If not, back to the drawing board. You're not alone, though.
 

Mr. Retrofire

macrumors 603
Mar 2, 2010
5,064
519
www.emiliana.cl/en
Hi Guys,

I've had this problem a few times recently and it's really starting to annoy me. Basically, my Late 2009 iMac will simply stop working. The screen is still displaying and I can move the cursor around as normal but nothing is actually responding.
...
If your iMac has two GPUs (integrated and discrete), disable the GPU switching with gfxCardStatus:
http://gfx.io/

This solved an identical problem on my Early-2011 17" MBP.
 

Kelmon

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Mar 28, 2005
725
0
United Kingdom
I've given the Recovery repair permissions and disk so we'll see what happens. Thanks for the tip, Silvereel.

No integrated graphics in this iMac, Metrofire, as far as I'm aware. I think this one was the last generation before that sort of thing started.
 
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