Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

2011 MacBook Pro locking up under simple tasks

S

Shady Pioneer

macrumors member
Original poster
Feb 22, 2011
84
0
Somerset, UK
I don't get this? I'm hardly ever doing anything intensive on my machine, and on more than one occasion Safari will lock up and usually quit, Finder has locked up a few times. I've had Photoshop lock up when doing the simplest of things.

I usually only have iTunes, Safari and Mail open, so why would it react this way? My 2010 I used to have never did this.

It's happened over the last month and a bit I reckon. I don't run Windows, and I haven't even pushed it to it's full potential yet. I don't want to because by the looks of it it won't cope.

What should I do?
 
______________________________________________________
Have a look at Activity Monitor (Applications / Utilities /) and select All Processes and sort by CPU to see what the culprit may be.
Also check the "System Memory" tab to see what your "Page ins:", "Page outs:" and "Swap used:" are.

image below uses sorting by CPU as an example
Acitivty_Monitor.png

Further reading:
______________________________________________________​
 
Shady Pioneer said:
I don't get this? I'm hardly ever doing anything intensive on my machine, and on more than one occasion Safari will lock up and usually quit, Finder has locked up a few times. I've had Photoshop lock up when doing the simplest of things.

I usually only have iTunes, Safari and Mail open, so why would it react this way? My 2010 I used to have never did this.

It's happened over the last month and a bit I reckon. I don't run Windows, and I haven't even pushed it to it's full potential yet. I don't want to because by the looks of it it won't cope.

What should I do?
Click to expand...

Have you checked for system updates? I'd update the firmware and OS. Ensure 10.6.7 is installed. I've read people, by doing those updates, found their problems vanished after that.

I've done a few test renders with Poser 2010, ran a VM in parallels and set up Office 2010 and other apps, etc, and have had zero problems. (the CPU gets as high as 85C (at fan RPM 5500), which is quite good all things considered...)
 
I'm not sure if you're experiencing the same problem, but I used to have issues with my Mac locking up randomly, usually for 10-20 seconds, because of Safari. For some reason, Safari would go nuts reading and writing to the hard drive and cause everything to freeze, since stuff comes to a halt when it can't access the drive.

I've been using Chrome for the past few months, which I've come to love, and I've never had the problem since. It was definitely Safari causing the issues. I've got a feeling it could be something to do with my cookies database or my extensive history log in Safari.

Anyway, I suggest trying a different browser and seeing if the problem persists.
 
MarcBook said:
I'm not sure if you're experiencing the same problem, but I used to have issues with my Mac locking up randomly, usually for 10-20 seconds, because of Safari. For some reason, Safari would go nuts reading and writing to the hard drive and cause everything to freeze, since stuff comes to a halt when it can't access the drive.

I've been using Chrome for the past few months, which I've come to love, and I've never had the problem since. It was definitely Safari causing the issues. I've got a feeling it could be something to do with my cookies database or my extensive history log in Safari.

Anyway, I suggest trying a different browser and seeing if the problem persists.
Click to expand...


It does tend to happen when Safari is open, and Safari will usually crash when the locking up happens. I'll try your suggestion on using a different browser though.

I've got Firefox, and I'll try Chrome too. Cheers, pal.

Snaky, is there any way I can test the hard drive to find out?
 
I've got the same thing ocassionally happening with my SSD. It will only happen when Safari is open, but as I always have Safari open I haven't been able to narrow it down further. I think it is possibly a glitch in these new computer sending too many reads/writes to the drive at once.. It never makes the system unstable and it comes back working fine after around 15-20 seconds.
 
-Ryan- said:
I've got the same thing ocassionally happening with my SSD. It will only happen when Safari is open, but as I always have Safari open I haven't been able to narrow it down further. I think it is possibly a glitch in these new computer sending too many reads/writes to the drive at once.. It never makes the system unstable and it comes back working fine after around 15-20 seconds.
Click to expand...

Yeah, this is exactly the problem I had with Safari. It used to drive me insane and I couldn’t stand using Safari any more. It seems to happen regardless of the type of hard drive because the browser completely hogs the read/write access during these periods, causing the computer to freeze.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back