Late 2011 MBP stuck shutting down

[philso]

Hi folks!

I've been having troubles restarting and shutting down my late 2011 MBP. It always gets stuck on the grey screen with the white spinning cirle-thing (the one that consists of many lines that light up clockwise). I'm running 10.8.3 with 4GB of DDR3 RAM, no SSD.

Now this hasn't really bothered me too much at first (since I don't shut it down too often, I usually just close it). If I want to shut it down completely, I need to press the power button for a slightly extended period of time, then it will turn off the HDD I think (you can hear a little click) just before it shuts down. When booting, I therefore always get the message that I shut my laptop down because of a problem and get asked whether I wish to reopen any programs that were open during shutdown.

I've browsed the web for solutions, but none of them fixed my problem. Also, after booting, it usually takes ages for the launchpad to load the applications, iPhoto is really slow (and always has been as far as I can remember, even when there were almost no photos in there). I've run Onyx a few times and executed all the default tasks once and every single task another time, however both didn't solve my problem.

Going to the Genius bar is not an option at the moment as the closest one is still pretty far away and I don't have the time to go there right now, besides I need my laptop every day so I wouldn't want it to be sent to Apple. A sales person at a certified Apple reseller couldn't help me.

Does anybody have any kind of idea of how to solve this problem? It's not a crucial matter, however it does get pretty annoying at times and besides, I'm not too sure if this whole thing is all that healthy for my little companion. Obviously, backing up the data and either upgrading to Mavericks or doing a clean install of Mountain Lion or Mavericks is still an option, however I'd really like to avoid this option, not only because I don't have a reliable external hard drive.

Thanks in advance and looking forward to any comments or solutions,
Phil

 

[Macman45]

I think your major issue here is RAM....4GB really isn't enough these day's, and because it's the older type it's not as cheap as the more modern modules.

check out crucial.com and run the little tool there. I think a boost to 8GB would really help if you plan on keeping the Mac.

 

[niteflyr]

Obviously, backing up the data and either upgrading to Mavericks or doing a clean install of Mountain Lion or Mavericks is still an option, however I'd really like to avoid this option, not only because I don't have a reliable external hard drive.

Phil

Fix this problem first. Make sure you have a reliable backup. A hard drive can fail at any time.

An install of Mavericks might take care of a lot of your issues. An install will take care of any software issues, and Mavericks does a much better job of managing memory.

 

[Voca]

You actually can upgrade your machine up to 16GB ram.
(PC3 10600 DDR3 204Pin 1333Mhz So-dim)

The spinning circle means, that you have a fair share of open/running applications - indicated by a light dot under the program in the Doc. Thats why it takes so long to shut down. Make sure you shut it down properly - pressing the power button to force shut down is not a good solution in the long run.

Also, clean up your machine once in a while, get rid of programs and data you do not need as well as keep a decent amount of free space on your hdd.
If you do not want to switch to OS X Mavericks, at least upgrade to 10.8.5

Further, are you running any programs like utorrent? Make sure, you close those when not in use.

 

[philso]

Fix this problem first. Make sure you have a reliable backup. A hard drive can fail at any time.

You're right, I'll have to get an external HDD. Maybe for the update, I'll just back up the most important data on Dropbox and hope nothing else gets lost...

The spinning circle means, that you have a fair share of open/running applications - indicated by a light dot under the program in the Doc. Thats why it takes so long to shut down.

Actually, I close all of my running applications before I try to shut the laptop down. And I almost never use apps simultaneously, anyways.

Make sure you shut it down properly - pressing the power button to force shut down is not a good solution in the long run.

I wish I could, but it just won't shut down any other way. I've been shutting it down like this for probably about a year now, nobody has been able to fix it so far...

Also, clean up your machine once in a while, get rid of programs and data you do not need as well as keep a decent amount of free space on your hdd.
If you do not want to switch to OS X Mavericks, at least upgrade to 10.8.5

Thanks for the advice, but I already do that all the time. My free HDD space is always over 100 GB, unused programs get deleted after a short while. I also use programs like CCleaner, Clean My Mac and Onyx on a regular basis. And the problem with upgrading to 10.8.5: Since an upgrade enforces a restart, but a restart is impossible due to the laptop not shutting down properly, the update never finishes up.

However, when I upgraded from Lion to Mountain Lion, the incapability of restarting has not affected the upgrade in any perceivable manner.

Do you guys have any other ideas or does anybody else?

Thanks (again and in advance),
Phil

 

[niteflyr]

Reset SMC. A shot in the dark, but worth a try:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3964

 

[philso]

Reset SMC. A shot in the dark, but worth a try:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3964

Thanks! I didn't actually reset the SMC because before doing that, I followed the instructions and put the laptop to sleep and woke it up again. Rebooting worked fine after that and then shutting it down didn't cause any more problems, either. I've rebooted and shut down a few times now and it seems that not only is the problem gone, but the MBP is a little bit faster now, too. This obviously might be a product of euphoria, but the Launchpad doesn't take ages to load all the applications anymore, especially just after booting, so it seems just putting it to sleep and then rebooting might have done the trick.

Should the problem return, I will do that again and otherwise reset the SMC. Would it be wise to do that even if there currently are no (other significant) issues? What could be the disadvantages?

Thanks again,
Phil

PS: The symptoms described on Apple's support site indicating a SMC reset might be necessary all occurred on my laptop.

 

[niteflyr]

No real downside. It may change some settings in Sys Prefs. but you can change them back. Glad it helped!

 

[philso]

No real downside. It may change some settings in Sys Prefs. but you can change them back. Glad it helped!

Cool, I might just do that then.

Regarding the enhanced speed, I forgot I upgraded to 10.8.5 after rebooting worked fine, so that might have been the reason for the Launchpad opening faster etc.