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HELP! MacBook Pro keeps hanging!

G

gangst

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Dec 27, 2004
614
0
UK
Hi,

Really could do with some help/ opinions please.

I'm using a 15" MacBook Pro...it's only 6 days old and it keeps hanging when i use it.

When i got it it didn't have SL installed but it came with the disc so i installed that immediately. For the first 4 days it worked like a new Mac should..it was great. Over the last week i have been installing all the apps I need and putting some files on it, but nothing to much.

However, when I use this Mac it keeps hanging...it has happened twice in the course of writing this so far. I am not even using the Mac intensively...I have Firefox, Mail, iTunes and Vuze open and it keeps hanging, in which time whatever i am doing freezes and I get the beech ball for a few seconds then everything resumes normally. Or if that doesn't occur iTunes will randomly pause then play again.

I have repaired permissions, verified the disc etc...but it has continued to do so. This is driving me mad, it is unworkable and infuruating.

Does anyone know of what may be causing this or ways to stop the problem. Seeing as the Mac is not a week old i might just take it back?

Any thoughts please.
 
electroshock said:
The EFI 1.7 firmware was the first thing I thought, but if it's a new MBP with a stock drive, seems somewhat unlikely this is the culprit.
Click to expand...

Why do you think that?!

New MBP have EFI 1.7 AND have problems with stock drive.

But...

I would check your installed programs to see if one of them doesn't give instability problems. Hanging can come of many things. As a last action you can revoke the purchase and get your money back but check the usual suspects when it comes to hanging computers.
 
Cheers for the replies.

I will try the FDI stuff...do I need to downgrade from 1.7 to 1.6 then. This is making my Mac unusable. I thought I had got to the bottom of it earlier when I closed Vuze and the problem went away, I just assumed the software was buggy, however, it came back when I was running parallels and few other apps.
 
I was under the impression stock hdds are fine because they run a custom Apple firmware to rate them down to SATA1 speeds?

May I ask what is the size of the HDD, and where you purchased the macbook from? Also, when was it built? (this may be incorrect if it was a refurb etc) You can check via http://www.chipmunk.nl/klantenservice/applemodel.html

I am hoping mine is fine when it arrives next week :S Apple will be getting a phonecall if it isnt :mad::mad:
 
Yep...it's a MacBook Pro 2.66GHz it has a 320GB Toshiba Drive and I picked it up from the Apple store last Sunday.

I just installed 10.6.1 and the problems went away for a few minutes, but now they are back. I just think it is really weird as I had nothing like this for the first 5 days of owning the Macbook Pro and it started last night and has got worse today.
 
All we know that some computers show these problems yet others are fine. If we look at the statistics you will be fine but other customes have had problems with pre-installed EFI 1.7 and stock harddrive out of the box.

The shown problem with EFI 1.7 could be anything, manufacturing default of Nvidia that have a too high false percent or bad imaging in the assembly factory. It goes on with guesses up to the firmware being bad programming but that is refuted by the percent of macbook pros that works ok.

To OP:

can you do a reinstall of a clean system to take away issues of software that are not compatible with OS X 10.6?
 
I could do a clean install but I really don't want to at the moment. I have spent a week getting this Mac how i like it and to do it all again immediately would be horrendous.

You mentioned possibly a faulty nVidia chip...is there any way of finding out if this is the case. One thing for sure when Vuze is open it makes the problem occur much more often. However, this was not the case only a few days ago!

I'm considering just taking it back and getting a new one...how long is Apple's refund clause, and will they do it in store?
 
Do you have an external hdd by any chance? You could backup/image the internal drive to it and format and play around, then restore the image when done.

To test for the beachball issue, (i saw it in a video somwhere on here or apple.com forum) watch a video from the harddrive whilst running a drive benchmark test (AJA System Test was in the vid). After a short while, it will all freeze and beachball, and the drive benchmark will go to zero for a while, then 15 secs later or so, back to fullspeed and the video will play again. this will be repeatable in theory if you have the issue.
 
Yes i do have external and am going to backup my files and reformat it. I rang the Apple store and they have put a new 15.4" aside so I think I will just back up my files, format the disc and take it back.

I don't think I should have to be fiddling around with this kind of stuff, it's brand new for gods sake! So I will just get the replacement and put my files on it.
 
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