Freezing when i shut down an app...

[Brows]

I am a new mac owner and I'm still trying to figure it all out but this has been happening since i bought the macbook pro in may and I've waited for a few osx updates to see if anything resolved it but no such luck. Ive since upgraded to lion hoping it would solve it but again no luck. I reformatted and did a clean install and then ported my info back over with carbon copy cloner and still having the same issues.

When i shut down a program the screen will freeze. keyboard still appears to be active( caps lock key works) but the mouse is not showing up on the screen. again i believe that its all working in the background but nothing shows on the screen except what ever I had open when i closed the last app resulting in the freeze.

What i have been doing is holding down the power button to reboot the MBP and going from there. its getting a bit old now.

its a completely random thing from what i can tell. doesn't happen to just one program it can be anything that can trigger it. it happens about 2-3 times a day and I'm only on the comp for maybe 4 hrs avg.

What can i do to try and start tracking this down? or maybe someone has any info that might help?

Thanks
Brows

 

[SkaarjHunter]

What are the specs of your Macbook Pro?

 

[Detrius]

Set your clock to flash the time separator or set it to show seconds. This will help you determine immediately if the system is still running when these "freezes" occur.

In my experience, virtually any hard freeze on OS X (where the mouse stops moving and keyboard doesn't work) will ultimately boil down to hardware, be it a USB problem where the input devices are being disconnected, or be at a logic board issue that crashes the OS so hard that it can't even show the kernel panic message.

 

[Brows]

here are the specs:
Macbook pro 17" I7 2.3ghz 4gb ram 500gb hdd 7200rpm

as for wether the system is still running I'm pretty sure it is cuz when it has done it I have been mashing buttons trying to unfreeze it and I've hit the F8 play button and the music on the system started playing, not a cd, but mp3s on the had drive. and when i press it when not frozen iTunes opens and if i press it again the music starts. so I'm thinking that i must have pushed the play button twice while i was mashing buttons trying to unfreeze. I don't think that the time separator will show as i don't have a mouse cursor and nothing changes on the screen its just frozen at the state its in.

is there a log or something that i can try and find that might indicate anything for when the crash happened?

Also thanks for the reply i was getting worried none was gone reply

 

[Brows]

ok i was wrong ... It just froze on me again... I can't open iTunes while frozen and your right the clock separator doesn't flash. where do i go from here?

 

[Detrius]

I'm leaning heavily toward hardware--likely logic board or RAM. Unless there's a panic that's reported when you reboot the machine, there's not likely to be anything in the logs. If you upgraded the RAM yourself, I'd put the original RAM back in and see if it fixes the issue. Otherwise, bring it in for (likely) warranty repair.

 

[Brows]

hmm ... that sucks ... at least i have warranty, i haven't upgraded anything on the mbp yet, should i just take it in or should i be talking to apple by phone first?

 

[DWBurke811]

i would say take it in, but if you're "unable to reproduce the problem" in the store you might have a hard time getting anywhere.

 

[Brows]

i know its been a while but i took the MBP in and got it all sorted out. It was a hardware issue. after about 4 separate 3 hr round trips to the mac store local to me and one replaced screen and one replaced logic board everything runs great now. for some reason they thought that replacing the screen would fix it ... no dice and so then they replaced the logic board. all in all aside from the trips to and from great experience with apple store and its staff.

Thanks for the help here and the insite on my probs