Mac sometimes completely freezes

[markturnip]

This is an issue I've come across with Macs the last few years & it's only taken me until now to raise any question as to why. It's not specific to Snow Leopard.

Sometime after using my Mac for a while it will just completely freeze up without any explanation why. The CPU is below 50% and still has around 100mb free memory. Eventually if I leave my machine long enough it will get to the state where I can quit a few apps, but it still be awfully slow until I restart the computer.

I admit that I very rarely shut my computer down, most of the time just sleep repeatedly for as long as 2/3 weeks... This isn't a specific issue to the machine, I've experienced this on my old iBook, iMac & now MacBook Pro.

Is there any explanation to this? - How can I avoid it happening, or should I just get in the habit of not leaving apps running when I'm not using them?

Any advice will be really appreciated!

Thanks.

Mark

I did wonder if it was an issue similar to this:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/875202/

I've posted to this thread.

But as I said, this isn't specific to Snow Leopard.

Would it worth risking disabling the dynamic pager?

Thanks.

I do wonder if It's something to do with my usage of the computer.

For example, I may always install I program that causes issues?

or for example, I may leave lots of safari tabs open or leave documents open unnecessarily?

But the fact that the CPU/Memory levels are in the ok, why should it slow down?

Could it possibly be anything to do with external drives?

Whenever I plug a particular external drive it seems to upset the computer...

 

[celticpride678]

Please edit your current post to post updates you have found.

100 MB is very little to run a OS. Consider upgrading your RAM.

 

[Sun Baked]

Could it possibly be anything to do with external drives?

Whenever I plug a particular external drive it seems to upset the computer...

Probably the drive, can be a firmware issue related to the USB/FW card inside the case -- or the drive itself is dying.

If the drive freezes, many times it'll freeze the OS.

Could also be something as simple as slight orphaned nodes or minor file catalog errors tripping up the OS. So running Disk First Aid/repair is sometimes a good idea.

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Usually if the machine is freezing, and you see the clock stop flashing the seconds, a drive has frozen the OS.

So if you hadn't said it happens on all the machines when you use externals, we'd be telling you to backup the drive.