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Does your mac pro have any of these issues?

A

arcsbite

Guest
Original poster
Jan 14, 2006
749
1
my mac pro is about 2 months old and has been giving me nothing but trouble, I was wondering if anyone had any of the following problems with their machines....

Won't wake up after sleep - When my machine has been left alone for a few hours, I come back to it and try to wake it up, the screen comes back but I just get the spinning wheel, nothing works accept the mouse, and clicking does nothing.
I'm left with no option but to hold the power button.
Happens - Pretty much any time it is left alone for more than 5 hours.

Bluetooth lag - my BT might mouse is great, but whenever I open another application that uses bluetooth (salling clicker, Bluephone elite) my mouse instantly lags, not a little lag, but a jerky unresponsive lag.
I'm left turning my mouse off and on and this usually solves it for 10 mins.
Happens - Everytime I use the bluetooth on my machine, without fail

Airport dropping network - I'm hooked up to my wireless network via the new Apple airport, it's about 5 feet from my machine. My macbook pro is also connected to the airport wirelessly downstairs.
randomly my mac pro will simply drop the internet, the airport logo in the menu bar will still be full, but the internet dies.
I'm left turning the airport (on my mac pro) off and on and reconnecting to the network, this "usually" does it, sometimes a restart is requires
Happens - every other day, can't seem to pinpoint, but this never happens to the mbp.

Superdrives vanish! - after booting up my machine the superdrives in my mac pro just don't exist!.
they can be empty, or contain disks, but for some reason after a boot up at random times they just won't exist in "get more info" holding eject does nothing.
I'm left having to restart the machine then it picks them up
Happens - again randomly, once or twice a week, but usually whilst there is a disk in.

reverts to internal speakers - after a restart or a boot from off my machine will revert to it's internal speakers.
system pref's still has my Bose Companions listed as the default and music and movie sounds will come through them, but all system sounds and oddly enough anything played through quicktime will come through the internal speakers, the keyboard sound controls apply to the internal speakers and do nothing to the Bose speakers.
I'm left having to reboot, changing sound to internal then back to external ins system prefs does nothing.
Happens - Every couple of times I boot my machine (seems to happen a lot after a forced restart due to one of the above problems)


Have you got/had any of these problems?
what do you suggest?
I have an appointment at the genius bar tomorrow morning but I just don't know what to do, I've had an ibook, iMac, a Blackbook, a macbook pro and now my mac pro and I've never had any of these issues with any of my other machines.

it's driving me insane, I actually contemplated going back to windows the other day.
 
No
No
No
No
No

Sounds like you might have a bit of a dodgy machine, there... either that or each item is just coincidence. The WLAN and Bluetooth issues could be caused by some sort of RF interference, so you might want to check that out. Personally I wouldn't use a BT mouse with a Mac Pro, I can't really see the point, but if you want to and, lets face it, Apple sell it as an option, then it should work. Anyway, get a wired MM ;)

See what the genius says. You may have to let them take the machine in for repair, but it might be worth running things like Techtool, repairing disk permissions, verifying the disk and even doing an archive and install before you let them take it away.

Don't go back to windows :) There are plenty of problems to be had on that side of the river too!
 
My Mac Pro REFUSES to go to sleep whenever my 23" ACD is plugged in. Kind of the opposite of the problem you have.

Did you have your BT and Airport Extreme cards installed by Apple? Or did you do it yourself? Try having your BT module connected to antenna #1, and the APE connected to antennas #2 and #3. I have my modules installed this way and they work flawlessly. There's a guide here in one of the threads, do a search.

Superdrive seems to work fine for me, no problem at all although i might not be a good gauge as i rarely use my drive.

Yeah my Mac Pro does that sometimes, routing the sound to the internal speaker as opposed to the ear phones that are plugged in on start up. Don't know if its a hardware or software issue but just unplug the ear phones and plug them back in. Works for me.

Cheers.
 
As far as the speakers, when I reboot it always goes back to the internal speakers. Never figured out why but it's nice to know that it seems like the normal thing for it to do. I guess 3 occurrences doesn't make it normal, but at least I know it happens to other people now.
 
I'm glad to say I have none of the above problems.

A very occasional problem .... When you put it to sleep, it immediately wakes up again. This has only happened two or three times in four months.
 
I've not seen any of these problems with my Mac Pro. In fact, I've never even heard of any of them.
 
Won't wake up after sleep

I never sleep my desktop computer. I've NEVER trusted the sleep option.

Bluetooth lag

N/A - I don't have bluetooth.

Airport dropping network

Never had the problem and I use Airport with a Linksys router all the time.

Superdrives vanish!

Never had the problem.

reverts to internal speakers

Hmmm... not sure.


It sounds like it's time to either troubleshoot the computer, which might involve testing the machine with Apple Hardware Test (on your system disk) or an archive and reinstall of the MacOS. If the troubleshooting doesn't work, phone Apple or an AASP.
 
Ah Yes, I've seen these problems

Hi There,

Well I purchased a Mac Pro about 4 months ago, and can relate to a few problems. Decided to switch from my PC to Mac, mostly for Audio recording (Logic) and the fact I can play warcraft.

I'm no Apple fan boy, and run a IT Department full of PC's. So no biase on my behalf :)

Bluetooth Lag.

When ever I switch on my mac pro, it takes about 30 seconds for my keyboard to be detected via bluetooth. Sometimes I have to switch on/off the bluetooth keyboard for it to work. But once it's detected, everything works fine. So a small but annoying problem.

Airport Dropping Connection

Quite often experience Wireless issues with Wireless Lan. Tried with Linksys, Dlink. Often encounter occasional drop outs. Not very impressed with the wireless to be honest, seems a good linksys card is far superior (PC has yet to cause me wireless problems).

But one thing which really gets me going, is the state of Video Cards. Apple, what are you playing at? The x1900XT is aging fast, and your still selling this for over £240.00? If this machine is really state of the art, write some new drivers for a new card!
 
Thanks for the input guys.
sounds like I may have a bit of a lemon.

I have re-installed the OS 3 times since I got the machine I even took out the stock drive and installed OS on a different sata, I've verified and repaired permissions countless times, I've archive and installed in case it was that.
seems to keep happening.

The BT and Wi-Fi were CTO from apple.
I researched the issue about a month ago and found that switching some of the internal cabling would help, it did, but it didn't fix the issue.

hope the genius' can help me, although being intermittent I'm unsure how.
gonna back everything up and take it in tomorrow, fingers crossed.

I couldn't cope on windows, I've only been using OS for about 2 years but I can't imagine going back, guessing I just have a rogue mac.
 
Of the problems listed, the only one that I experience is that the wireless connection seems to drop out once and a while. The funny thing is that when this happens, the airport menu bar applet shows that it is still connected and has a good signal reported. However, in reality the network does not work at this point. All I need to do to get it to work again is re-select the network name for the airport router (which was already shown as selected by the way) and everything is back up and running.

I have the new Airport Extreme 802.11n router and it works great with the exception of this one problem. On the network are only three Macs and two Apple TVs, all with apple 802.11n wireless cards. I'm also running the network as "n" only at 5 GHz with WAP2 enabled.

Dave
 
None of these symptoms, however, I noticed that after the update from 10.4.8 to 10.4.9 there
seems to be an extra 10-20 second (above and beyond the normal time) lag between power button
press and that startup bong.

I reformatted the drive and reinstalled the os and was fine until I updated to 10.4.9 again.
Certainly not a big deal but a silly little annoyance none the less.
 
4God said:
None of these symptoms, however, I noticed that after the update from 10.4.8 to 10.4.9 there
seems to be an extra 10-20 second (above and beyond the normal time) lag between power button
press and that startup bong.

I reformatted the drive and reinstalled the os and was fine until I updated to 10.4.9 again.
Certainly not a big deal but a silly little annoyance none the less.
Click to expand...

Might want to startup in verbose mode and see what is going on there.


To turn on Verbose booting, at the Terminal type the following:
sudo nvram boot-args="-v"

Disabling Verbose booting is just as easy:
sudo nvram boot-args=
 
Did you have your BT and Airport Extreme cards installed by Apple? Or did you do it yourself? Try having your BT module connected to antenna #1, and the APE connected to antennas #2 and #3. I have my modules installed this way and they work flawlessly. There's a guide here in one of the threads, do a search.
Click to expand...


Agreed. This is likely the issue with the wireless devices.
 
macenforcer said:
Might want to startup in verbose mode and see what is going on there.


To turn on Verbose booting, at the Terminal type the following:
sudo nvram boot-args="-v"

Disabling Verbose booting is just as easy:
sudo nvram boot-args=
Click to expand...

you could also just hold down cmd-v during startup, does the same thing, although I don't know if it'll start displaying information early enough to clear anything up.

Back to the OP, sounds like you have a bunch of small annoying problems that combine to really suck, but the wake-from-sleep problem sounds to me like it could be hardware related...

I know this is just a workaround, but I personally just gave up on wireless after a few months of issues. Once in a while I'll use it for a laptop, but rarely. Using gigabit ethernet, or even 100, is faster than any wireless (obviously doesn't matter if you don't share files, but I do), it really never drops, and after I walked by a neighbor sitting outside with his laptop at 1am and saw his background said "Back|Track2" (a linux liveCD for cracking wireless, I've tried it myself, WEP is a snap, WPA takes a little longer but it's absolutely possible), I decided I'd really prefer the security.
 
volvoben said:
after I walked by a neighbor sitting outside with his laptop at 1am and saw his background said "Back|Track2" (a linux liveCD for cracking wireless, I've tried it myself, WEP is a snap, WPA takes a little longer but it's absolutely possible), I decided I'd really prefer the security.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I would have smacked that laptop right off of his lap and on to the cement. Next slap comin at his head. YOu might as well have caught him trying to jimmy your back door.
 
macenforcer said:
Yeah, I would have smacked that laptop right off of his lap and on to the cement. Next slap comin at his head. YOu might as well have caught him trying to jimmy your back door.
Click to expand...

My first thought was that I was glad someone was hanging around outside so at least I wouldn't worry about my car being broken into yet again (great neighborhood...unless you're a car, every honda/toyota on the street has been hit because it's such a quiet residential neighborhood and no one's around at 3am), but I also found it odd because there are at least 2 open networks available in the neighborhood. I suppose that means they were just tooling around like the 16 year old nerds they are or they're looking to gain access to someone's machine, either way I'll stick to wired.
 
macenforcer said:
Might want to startup in verbose mode and see what is going on there.


To turn on Verbose booting, at the Terminal type the following:
sudo nvram boot-args="-v"

Disabling Verbose booting is just as easy:
sudo nvram boot-args=
Click to expand...


Thanks,

volvoben said:
you could also just hold down cmd-v during startup, does the same thing, although I don't know if it'll start displaying information early enough to clear anything up........
Click to expand...

and thanks. I just saw these posts now that I just finished reinstalling 10.4.8. :eek:
Seems to work fine with this version. I think I might just wait for Leopard.
Thanks again though. :)
 
It's doing it in 10.4.8 now too! Dang, I think ever since I tried BootCamp, things
have gone crazy. Gonna switch hard drives today to see if it helps.
 
I have none of those problems except for one - even if I have speakers plugged in and turned out, the 'bong' sound at startup will come out of the internal speakers (in a way, this is good, as I tend to forget to turn down my speakers and get blasted by the bong). But everything else will come out of my Klipsch system after startup - including system sounds.
 
Father Jack said:
I'm glad to say I have none of the above problems.

A very occasional problem .... When you put it to sleep, it immediately wakes up again. This has only happened two or three times in four months.
Click to expand...

I had that problem once - it simply wouldn't go to sleep. So then I tried shutting it down, and Azureus (which was active) wasn't responding, I had to force quit it, and then all was well.
 
I took it in to my genius app yesterday, about 40mins and he couldn't diagnose it.
he's ordered a new optical drive, Bluetooth and Airport card for it.

it's been taken away for further diagnostics and I'll have it back in 5-10 days

*fingers crossed*
 
Father Jack said:
I'm glad to say I have none of the above problems.

A very occasional problem .... When you put it to sleep, it immediately wakes up again. This has only happened two or three times in four months.
Click to expand...

That issue has been experienced by me on a number of Macs - I have isolated the issue to having multiple USB hubs chained together. Multiple hubs gone has equalled consistent sleep :)
 
bluetooth sucks on my mac pro. but i assume that's because the wires were attached in a nonoptimal way by apple. whenever i get the jerky bt mouse, i just turn it off and turn it back on.
 
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