Ok somethings not right.. again - Alu. MacBook

[acfusion29]

Every 10-15min I get the beachball wheel spinning and everything locks up for about 20 seconds. I have music playing, and it stops playing, firefox is frozen, I can't force quit anything.

I'm reparing disk permissions and if this happens again I'll call Apple. What would it be guys?

[iBookG4user]

Have you created another user account? If so, does it happen in the other user account as well?

[acfusion29]

Have you created another user account? If so, does it happen in the other user account as well?

I have not.

I have the following apps open:

Mail, Firefox, MSN, iChat, Skype and iTunes.

I'm occasionally replying to messages on MSN and iChat, sometimes Skype, however it froze all 3 times while I was surfing the net on Firefox. :o

It just started happening today, it was fine before...

I understand that there is a log that I can retrieve? Where would I get this and would I be able to post here so you guys can dissect it since probably got no idea what it means :p

[acfusion29]

Right after I posted the above comment, my Firefox locked up but my iTunes music didn't stop playing. I was able to force quit this time though. I'm running the beta (3.1). Could it be possible that Firefox is crashing my entire system? Should I go ahead and re-install 3?

[applephysci]

If you haven't done this yet, try to isolate the problem. Since you have Mail, Firefox, MSN, iChat, Skype and iTunes all open, and since at least both itunes and firefox seems to freeze, there may be one culprit or so that actually incites this. Open and leave Activity Monitor on, and reproduce the problem. You can then visually see the CPU and memory used for each program as this problem happens again. If you can then isolate the one that seems to hog down your resources, you may be able to get closer to which process is the culprit here. Tackling this culprit may help.

Every 10-15min I get the beachball wheel spinning and everything locks up for about 20 seconds. I have music playing, and it stops playing, firefox is frozen, I can't force quit anything.

I'm reparing disk permissions and if this happens again I'll call Apple. What would it be guys?

[acfusion29]

If you haven't done this yet, try to isolate the problem. Since you have Mail, Firefox, MSN, iChat, Skype and iTunes all open, and since at least both itunes and firefox seems to freeze, there may be one culprit or so that actually incites this. Open and leave Activity Monitor on, and reproduce the problem. You can then visually see the CPU and memory used for each program as this problem happens again. If you can then isolate the one that seems to hog down your resources, you may be able to get closer to which process is the culprit here. Tackling this culprit may help.

Thanks for the suggestion, I will try this.

[kastenbrust]

Every 10-15min I get the beachball wheel spinning and everything locks up for about 20 seconds. I have music playing, and it stops playing, firefox is frozen, I can't force quit anything.

I'm reparing disk permissions and if this happens again I'll call Apple. What would it be guys?

Did this start happening after you installed Windows 7 beta as it says in your signature?

[TBi]

Did this start happening after you installed Windows 7 beta as it says in your signature?

Installing windows or any other operating system as dual boot will not in any way effect OSX. Unless the problem is caused by reduced disk space...

[kastenbrust]

Installing windows or any other operating system as dual boot will not in any way effect OSX. Unless the problem is caused by reduced disk space...

Thats not true, actually it does, and i can show you many instances on this forum where it has. Sometimes windows likes to overwrite the Mac OS X drivers, noone knows why, but when they share the same disk even on different partitions, this happens in 0.01% of cases.

[TBi]

Thats not true, actually it does, and i can show you many instances on this forum where it has. Sometimes windows likes to overwrite the Mac OS X drivers, noone knows why, but when they share the same disk even on different partitions, this happens in 0.01% of cases.

Windows can't even read/write to the Mac file system. There is no way it can possibly overwrite the Mac OSX drivers.

However it can be forced (this is not default) to format/remove the Mac or EFI partition. This is not default behavior and is more than likely user error.

[acfusion29]

Did this start happening after you installed Windows 7 beta as it says in your signature?

I've had windows 7 installed for about a week and it started happening yesterday

[mcdj]

My guess would be too many chat/VOIP apps. They're furiously polling in the background.

[acfusion29]

My guess would be too many chat/VOIP apps. They're furiously polling in the background.

The programs that I listed above I have always running. On top of those, I have photoshop or final cut open and it runs without any problems.

[acfusion29]

Ok guys... it didn't happen again since I made this thread until now.

I have opened activity monitor and will let you guys know what happened. I have the same programs open as before, but it seems like it was MSN that froze. It's buggy as hell, so I wouldn't be surprised. I only had 1 chat window open and I was typing and it froze.

[bobnugget]

Hi, which hard disk were you having the beachball issues with? Are you still having them?

[pellets007]

Firefox has been locking up on me as well, if you take any solace in that.

[opinioncircle]

About your IM clients, why don't you put them altogether? I mean if it's possible, I think you should do it...

[Joruus]

Your Hard Drive is failing, turn the Notebook off and get to a Authorized Dealer.

[Kat King123]

try reseting pram/smc

[adamfishercox]

Surprised it took so long for someone to diagnose it as the hard drive. It's dying. Make backups now!!

[Consultant]

Have you verified disk?

Put in original ram and test.

Could be the HD?

Do you have music / files on connected external usb 2 drive?

[TuffLuffJimmy]

I had a similar problem, I would scroll through iTunes and iTunes would freeze for a good ten seconds. It's especially weird since my computer could power through everything else, but when I was making a playlist this would happen every few scrolls. Since I got my software all up to date though I haven't had an issue.

[andypandy]

I´ve had this problem too since I purchased my MacBook back in December. From what I´ve understood from other forums around the web this problem seems to be related to the machine not being able to handle 4GB RAM.

Lots of users are having this problem, and it does not seem related to what software you have installed or are using.

The only solution that seems to work is to reduce the amount of RAM.

[touchdownjesus4]

I had a similar problem, I would scroll through iTunes and iTunes would freeze for a good ten seconds. It's especially weird since my computer could power through everything else, but when I was making a playlist this would happen every few scrolls. Since I got my software all up to date though I haven't had an issue.

I bought my macbook in December and I upgraded the memory to 4GB about 3 months ago. i have had no problems with the machine not being able to handle the 4GB. Why would it not be able to handle it if it is apple supported and tested?

[TuffLuffJimmy]

I bought my macbook in December and I upgraded the memory to 4GB about 3 months ago. i have had no problems with the machine not being able to handle the 4GB. Why would it not be able to handle it if it is apple supported and tested?

don't quote me since I didn't say that. I don't believe that 4GB is the problem either. It's a 64bit system, there's no reason why it would choke on 4GB.

[bobnugget]

don't quote me since I didn't say that. I don't believe that 4GB is the problem either. It's a 64bit system, there's no reason why it would choke on 4GB.

Quite a few 2x2GB DIMMs aren't compatible with the MacBook apparently.