Freezing MacBook. Only when not plugged into the charger though.

[Brettka7]

Took my MacBook (bought august 2011) into the apple store. They send it out for repair because it's slow/freezing, beach ball comes up all the time. When you plug it into power, it works perfectly. They send it back saying it has water damage. I had no idea, but it's not impossible. But how could water damage do this?

 

[GGJstudios]

Took my MacBook (bought august 2011) into the apple store. They send it out for repair because it's slow/freezing, beach ball comes up all the time. When you plug it into power, it works perfectly. They send it back saying it has water damage. I had no idea, but it's not impossible. But how could water damage do this?

If it does have water damage, any number of things could go wrong. Launch Activity Monitor and change "My Processes" at the top to "All Processes", then click on the CPU column heading once or twice, so the arrow points downward (highest values on top). Also, click on the System Memory tab at the bottom. Then take a screen shot, scroll down to see the rest of the list, take another screen shot and post them.

 

[Xcallibur]

Well the only changes I know of that occur when changing to charged power are the changes in system performance, so your GPU may be activated, which may be the cause of the problem (can't see why though), your CPU is allowed to go into turbo mode, although that may occur anyway even when not charging, even so, I can't see how an increase in CPU output would cause a system freeze, if the CPU was damaged the computer wouldn't turn on at all!

So after all that, the only causes I could think of would be faults in your GPU driver/hardware. It could be a buggy application which runs automatically when in charging mode though. But I cannot see water damage being the cause of the slowdowns though. It would be good to see what theories other members on this forum have.