Mac Pro is Freezing

[jkaz]

Hi,

The Mac Pro in particular is primarily used for video editing.

The only problem I can 'confirm' on the MP is a process from compressor that leaves a hanging process long after compressor has been shut down- it seems to suck hard drive and ram resources until a reboot.

The only freezes I can personally confirm have been triggered by playing WoW(sorry).

I load up wow and at some point, the machine freezes. In conjunction with these freezes, in some places on the screen i see a bit of a purplish checkerboard pattern - video card problem?

Other times I have noticed the hard drive seeming to be spinning too long to load up simple things like safari. It is also most common that during this scenario, in activity monitor, the hanging compressor process is there and I am unable to force quit it or anything.

WoW and Compressor (perhaps other apps) have been reinstalled.

I'm concerned I have a hard drive failure or video card issues or worse.

I'm considering buying a 3rd internal hard drive to install a fresh copy of OSX then transferring important files over.

Not sure what else to do, all updates should be current.

Thanks,

Jeff

 

[matteusclement]

first above all else, back up those files.

when was the last time you did a fresh install of OS X?
what version do you have now?

how clean is the inside of your MP?

 

[lighthouse_man]

If it's the internal drive, then by all means do a backup. The problem could very well be the drive or the data ribbon connected to it.