I can't play an episode of planet earth (.mkv, 4.4gb) on my one month old penryn 2.5ghz mbp w/ 4 gigs of ram without it freezing. is there something wrong with my ram or my processor? 
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CANNOT play hd movies on mbp penryn 2.5
- Thread starter pooterscientist
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time to run some diagnostics:
run memtest:
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/17156
Ideally, run it from Terminal, running 2 copies, each testing half the memory (to stress both processors). If you don't know how to do that, d/l and run Rember (if you make a copy of it, you can run both copies at once).
Rember is built on top of memtest.
memtest is a much tougher memory test than anything else (esp. better than Apple's hardware test).
In Disk Utiltity:
Run Repair Permissions
Run "Verify Disk"
Also run Apple's diagnostics:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303605
(preferably set it up to loop multiple times)
If you have TechTool Pro, you can run its diagnostics;
If you bought AppleCare, you'll have a copy of TechTool Deluxe, which has a lesser set of diagnostics.
run memtest:
http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/17156
Ideally, run it from Terminal, running 2 copies, each testing half the memory (to stress both processors). If you don't know how to do that, d/l and run Rember (if you make a copy of it, you can run both copies at once).
Rember is built on top of memtest.
memtest is a much tougher memory test than anything else (esp. better than Apple's hardware test).
In Disk Utiltity:
Run Repair Permissions
Run "Verify Disk"
Also run Apple's diagnostics:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=303605
(preferably set it up to loop multiple times)
If you have TechTool Pro, you can run its diagnostics;
If you bought AppleCare, you'll have a copy of TechTool Deluxe, which has a lesser set of diagnostics.
I have Leopard, and the memtest site doesn't say it supports it. Are there any alternatives?
I plan on running TechTool Deluxe, but haven't had a chance yet.
If you follow the link to the developer's site, it says 10.4 or later. The info for Rember, which includes the memtest binary, explicitly says 10.5. So, I'm confident that it does run on 10.5.
If you don't want to pay the $1.39 d/l fee, download Rember and use that.
You may be experiencing a known graphics bug between the graphics card and the Leopard graphics update (possibly pre-installed on your system)
Search your console logs for repeated entries that include:
NVChannel(GL): Graphics channel exception
around the time of the crash. If you have them, check out the Apple discussions thread here.
Right now, the only solution is to un-officially downgrade the Graphics Update, or re-install Leopard and skip the Graphics Update.
Different people are experiencing the bug in different ways, (for me it was changing tabs in the Illustrator CS3 tool palette) I did the downgrade, and now I have some Finder interface weirdness, but it's better than crashing!
Search your console logs for repeated entries that include:
NVChannel(GL): Graphics channel exception
around the time of the crash. If you have them, check out the Apple discussions thread here.
Right now, the only solution is to un-officially downgrade the Graphics Update, or re-install Leopard and skip the Graphics Update.
Different people are experiencing the bug in different ways, (for me it was changing tabs in the Illustrator CS3 tool palette) I did the downgrade, and now I have some Finder interface weirdness, but it's better than crashing!