Hi I have a Macbook Air that is acting up. I've been having system stability problems for a while now. The two most recent issues were where I could move the mouse around the screen but couldn't click on anything; the interface wouldn't respond to clicks. I ran a hardware test prior to these two recent issues and it passed. Also I did a first aid on the drive as well. Any ideas what might be happening? Can we determine whether it's hardware or software? The freezes only happen every several days at the most. They went away for at least a couple weeks but then decided to come back in the past week and a half or so for the two most recent ones. I do have paid Malwarebytes on the system and Acronis but protection is disabled for Acronis. Thanks!
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Macbook Air Becoming Unresponsive
- Thread starter riverofwind
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Slartibart
macrumors 68040
DaveEcc
macrumors 6502
Is your SSD full or nearly full? MacOS (and iOS) behave really poorly when this occurs. SSDs need a certain percentage of free space to work smoothly. Without that space, any normally instantaneous tiny write to disk can take significant time, making everything extremely sluggish.
Slartibart
macrumors 68040
OP @riverofwind please provide details about macbook, connected peripherals and macOS used. be as detailed as possible please.
@Bigwaff Sorry bout that it's a 2022 M2 MBA with 16 GB RAM and Tahoe 26.2 installed. It has a 1 TB drive with 446 GB available. The only thing hooked up is a Samsung T9 time machine backup drive.
@DaveEcc Please see above.
@Slartibart Ditto, thanks. Please let me know if you need any more info. I'm technical so not afraid of console and stuff.
@DaveEcc Please see above.
@Slartibart Ditto, thanks. Please let me know if you need any more info. I'm technical so not afraid of console and stuff.
Bigwaff
Contributor
Launch Activity Monitor, minimize and set the dock icon to be CPU Usage and select Window > CPU Usage. Now when it starts acting up, see if the CPU Usage is spiking. If so, you've got a runaway process consuming CPU.
That could be "ghost windows". Since Tahoe some apps behave that way if you close a window. You cant see that window any longer, but any click into the area where that window has been is not registering. Happens to me 100% reproducible with Thunderbird. Workaround: click on the desktop somewhere, switch back to Thunderbird and the ghost is gone.
Maybe yours is a completely different issue, but if you work with large windows it would explain the unresponsiveness to clicks that you experience.
That configuration should be very responsive. Echoing what others have said, see what Activity Monitor reveals. If not, my next step would be to reinstall macOS using the recovery partition.
Do you have AppleCare? If the reinstall doesn’t help, maybe some time with an Apple Store genius will provide some insight.
In addition to the other suggestions, maybe replace the thermal paste.
“My car is having a hard time starting sometimes.”
“Try disassembling the entire engine and modifying the crankshaft.” 🙄
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LOL. Replacing thermal paste under the CPU heat sink is a frequent fix for cheaply built Wintel clones, especially budget gaming machines. I’ve never heard it recommended for Macs before.
There have been some people who have insisted that certain models don’t have enough thermal paste installed out of the box, or that it supposedly dries up (?) over time. I mean, I guess? But I’ve been using Macs for decades now and have never had a reason to do this.
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Alpha Centauri
macrumors 68000
I had this done on my mid 2009 MBP and it dropped the CPU temp by 10 degrees (C) on that C2D.
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