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Aluminium M.B.P Freezing, driving me nuts!!!

T

tylerdurden9

macrumors member
Original poster
Nov 19, 2007
33
0
Hi there guys, I recently got my aluminium macbook pro 2.4ghz with 2gb of ram. Lest just say i love the sexy chap. spend more time just looking at it than anything else. I was a die hard pc enthusiast. You could even say i was a mac hater at one stage. Perhaps due to windows brainwashing or Microsoft binkers. But it is this forum in particular which made me make the move. I was tired and fed up with windows and it was reading your guys posts and watching you passionately debate everything mac that finally pushed me to make the move. You never see someone talk as passionately about a pc! So my upmost thanks to you guys as you have changed my technological life forever and Im finally excited about technology again. Anyway enough of the rambling and down to my problem and why Im here.

I only have or had two problems with my mbp. first seemed to be a graphic card issue where the screen with momentarily go blank for a few seconds and i had problems connecting to my external display. But thankfully these two problems seem to be sorted by the Nividia Graphics update.

My second problem is whats truly driving me mental. My mbp frequently freezes on me, i could be just lightly using my resources listening to music or watching a movie or surfing, it doesn't matter, the whole thing jams up making me have to force restart. I can only compare it to a cd skipping. As when sound is playing it usually repeats the same 1 sec of noise over and over. I cant think where the problem might lie. Can it be fixed with an update? Or should i look into returning it? and most importantly is there anyone else out there Having the same issues?

Any feedback would be a great help?
Cheers
 
I remember having something like this with my Mac Mini, but the difference is I was running about 4 or 5 labor intensive programs and it would freeze up on me.

You say you're new to Mac. I just want to make sure you know that you can force quit by pressing Command, Option, and Escape all at once.

Have you ran the Software Update at all?
 
Yeah i know how to force quit but when it freezes it becomes totally unresponsive, sound jams, mouse jams, the only thing i can is force a restart. I have done all the recent software updates as i said before the nividia update fixed my other problems. Im just worried that this problem perhaps isn't fixable by a software update and its just a defect on my system, as it doesn seem to matter what im doing, intensive or not, it still happens. It would just make my mind rest easier if there was more out there experiencing the same thing.
 
The next thing I would recommend doing is downloading an application called MainMenu. It installs into the toolbar and has a lot of options for system optimization.

Here's what I do- Once the application is installed, I changed my Batch Tasks. I select them all (see attachment)


I then execute the Batch Tasks. It usually will take 10 minutes. Maybe more. Just walk away for a while and let it do it's thing. Make sure that the Log Window is open so you can see what it's doing. And just a heads up, on my machine, once it gets to Repairing Disk Permissions, it doesn't show updates for a few minutes. Yours might do the same.


Edit- Forgot to mention that you should Restart your machine after you do any major system optimization, like the above.
 

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I Haven't used Mainmenu before, il try it out now and let you know how it goes. It seems quite similar to cocktail and cleanmymac and i use those quite regularly. Thanks for the help though. much appreciated. Its cracking me up. i cant get anything done, in fear of it freezing up. :mad:
 
tylerdurden9 said:
I Haven't used Mainmenu before, il try it out now and let you know how it goes. It seems quite similar to cocktail and cleanmymac and i use those quite regularly. Thanks for the help though. much appreciated. Its cracking me up. i cant get anything done, in fear of it freezing up. :mad:
Click to expand...

That's pretty much what this is. I feel like MainMenu does a better job for me though. It also has a few cool little tools, like Remove .DS Store Files (which are invisible files that are created every time you open a window). You can also enable/disable Dashboard. Etc. It just works, IMO. It's a nice little tool to have.
 
MrM said:
That's pretty much what this is. I feel like MainMenu does a better job for me though. It also has a few cool little tools, like Remove .DS Store Files (which are invisible files that are created every time you open a window). You can also enable/disable Dashboard. Etc. It just works, IMO. It's a nice little tool to have.
Click to expand...

OP shouldn't really be needing 3rd-party apps like these to get his MBP working reasonably. It should be able to run without freezing on its own.

Have you tried repair disk permissions? Is your Software Updater up-to-date? Do you notice kernel panics or elevated temperatures before it freezes?

I'd say bring it into a Genius if you've tried everything but you're still having issues.
 
I'm having the same problem with my 2.53ghz MBP w/ 4gb of ram. For this reason I believe it's not a resources issue, because mine freezes when I'm only running safari and messenger. I think it could be a problem with the nvidia card, because mine mostly freezes when I'm watching video, be it on YouTube or quicktime. Also, I find it happens more when I'm on the more powerful graphic processor, strangely enough. Have you tried testing this?

Hopefully this will be resolved quickly.
 
Ok so i optimized the system using mainmenu but not surprisingly it jammed up and froze. During the Browser Cache Clean to be exact. I ran it a second time successfully but haven't noticed any improvement unfortunately. Its a nice little app tho. I just dont see why it takes so long for it to do what cocktail does in a fraction of the time.

Yeah my software is most definitely up to date. any ive repaired the disk permissions multiple times to no avail. My temp is consistently around 65-70 when this happens so i dont think this is the issue. I would love to bring it to a "Genius" but unfortunately we have no such thing in ireland. I would have to pack it up and send it off to apple but this is something i dont want to do if the problem can be fixed by a simple update.

Thanks for the support Jhammer, nice to see someone floating in the same boat. I had my suspicions that it was the graphics card but i would of thought the latest update would of addressed this problem. 9 times out of 10 it happens when there is some sort of video playing. As more often than not i only notice as the sound locks into the same 1s loop. I normally always run in higher performance so i havent noticed if it does it in better battery life. Il test it out and see. Do you think this is something that can be fixed? or will it even be fixed if only a small selection of people are noticing it?

Could the 9600gt be faulty like in previous mbp generations?
 
I got my MBP on tues and am having similar issues seemingly with the 9600m gt. Mine is a week 3 2009 model and is faultless until I use bootcamp, especially playing any games. As soon as I try this the screen goes black and the comp freezes after a few minutes.
I've tried loads of different drivers but no luck and it's not due to overheating as the fans kick in and the temp never gets above 65c.

I've not had it freeze in OS X but don't use the 9600. Is there any easy way to push the gpu in OS X if I switch to better performance to see if I can get it to freeze?

Looks like it's a call to Apple! :(

Out of interest, will apple send out a replacement or wait until they get mine and confirm it's faulty? Not impressed so far with apples notebooks, the mb I bought 2 years ago had every fault going!
 
tylerdurden9 said:
Ok so i optimized the system using mainmenu but not surprisingly it jammed up and froze. During the Browser Cache Clean to be exact. I ran it a second time successfully but haven't noticed any improvement unfortunately. Its a nice little app tho. I just dont see why it takes so long for it to do what cocktail does in a fraction of the time.

Yeah my software is most definitely up to date. any ive repaired the disk permissions multiple times to no avail. My temp is consistently around 65-70 when this happens so i dont think this is the issue. I would love to bring it to a "Genius" but unfortunately we have no such thing in ireland. I would have to pack it up and send it off to apple but this is something i dont want to do if the problem can be fixed by a simple update.

Thanks for the support Jhammer, nice to see someone floating in the same boat. I had my suspicions that it was the graphics card but i would of thought the latest update would of addressed this problem. 9 times out of 10 it happens when there is some sort of video playing. As more often than not i only notice as the sound locks into the same 1s loop. I normally always run in higher performance so i havent noticed if it does it in better battery life. Il test it out and see. Do you think this is something that can be fixed? or will it even be fixed if only a small selection of people are noticing it?

Could the 9600gt be faulty like in previous mbp generations?
Click to expand...

Hmm, looks like we're in extremely similar situations. As you have said, the sound loop does occur when the laptop freezes, and we are having the same issue regarding video playback.

Unfortunately, it could very well be the 9600GT, as it is really only an overclocked 8600GT - not exactly the best thing to do to an already sketchy piece of hardware. Mine hasn't been so bad lately, but it often freezes in groups of 2 or 3, and then will be fine for a while. If it begins to happen again I might call AppleCare.

Oh, side note: Mine freezes almost exclusively when it is connected to my 23" ACD, which reinforces my belief that it's a graphics issue. It runs as "clamshell", but I leave it open for air circulation with only the ACD active.
 
Actually it sounds like a memory issue to me. Working in graphic design I'm in a building with 30 macs that all get used heavily, so we see every problem there is. This is my best guess.

Your problem has been seen on macs and PCs for the last 20 years and is most often attributed to faulty RAM. Try taking out one stick of ram at a time and seeing how the remaining one performs. If one of them causes the problem (should happen twice as often with half the ram) and the other doesn't at all, then it's RAM. It's a time consuming test, but it works. Even better, if you have 2 machines of the same type, swap the ram and see if the problem migrates to the other machine.
 
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