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MacBook Freezing up and randomly restarting...

yoda13

yoda13

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Sep 26, 2003
1,468
2
Texas
OK my MacRumors friends....I have a problem with my black Macbook 2.0ghz Core 2 Duo, which was purchased around Christmas of last year. It has taken to doing two things that are really starting to cause me problems. 1)It will radomly restart after waking from sleep, or for no reason at all in the middle of what ever I am doing 2)It will randomly freeze up and the only thing I can do is hold down the power button until it goes off...none of the usual commands, etc. will work.

Now, I am know that I am under warranty still, but I have not purchased AppleCare yet, though I will as soon as I can afford it at this point... I don't want to call AppleCare before I am sure it is not a software problem due to $$$, and I don't want to drive to the nearest AppleStore until I am out of options as it is a hundred miles away.

I had two sticks of OWC memory in it, and I thought that might be the problem, but I took those out and put the Apple memory that it shipped with back into the computer....I thought it might have helped, but now it is as bad as ever. I have reset the PMU and I have zapped the PRAM...I repaired permissions. I honestly don't know what else to do. But before I go to the trouble of going the process and possible expense of getting this thing fixed I wanted to know if anyone has any suggestions as to what is wrong, and if so, how I might go about fixing it myself....

Any help here would be GREATLY appreciated...:)
 
There's not much else I can think of making you try other than checking your third party peripherals and possibly verifying the drive in Disk Utility. I hope everything's backed up! :)
 
Hey mad jew,

Fortunately, I back everything up religiously these days...:)

I didn't used to and learned the hard way that I should. I actually have not tried to check the hard drive with disk utility...so i am going to do that now. Thanks for the suggestion.:)
 
ahh, sorry, meant to post back about that...it went fine, it says there is nothing wrong with it....so, I ordered AppleCare and it should arrive tomorrow. I have a humongous workload for tomorrow, so I won't be getting to it then, but I am going to activate AppleCare and either call them on Thursday or take it up to the Apple Store this weekend.

I do have one question though, is there anyway possible that doing a clean install of the software would in any way possible help me out? The reason I ask, is because when I got this computer last Christmas, I used the copy data from an older Mac feature...I am just curious...this feels like a hardware issue to me, but I am not certain enough in my knowledge to be completely confident of that...:)
 
Ok, I have looked at the Console and I am not sure what I am looking at...what should I be looking for?:)
 
Im a convert from the PC world. Regardless of what is happening, if it is a large chronic error like your describing I always backup and reinstall the OS. That and I like nice clean OS'es so it works out all around.
 
well, I am definitely not getting a kernal panic...I read what you linked to, and I have opened up console and looked at the crash logs and I can't see anything useful there, but I am still not sure if I am looking at the right thing there...there is a bunch of stuff there that seems odd to me, but I am not sure what I am looking at....
 
Yeah I know you're thankfully not getting a kernel panic but the troubleshooting techniques overlap. Maybe post what you found up here to see if anyone can work out what's happening. :)
 
elcid said:
Im a convert from the PC world. Regardless of what is happening, if it is a large chronic error like your describing I always backup and reinstall the OS. That and I like nice clean OS'es so it works out all around.
Click to expand...

Yep, I had to do a reinstall and now the MBP is working fine again. And much faster, too. :)
 
I am going to do a clean install today, and see if that fixes the problem...I have everything backed up and am using my old PowerBook for the time being....will post back with my results, hopefully this evening and if not, tomorrow then....:)
 
Yeah, its keeps sticking on something with the words calendar start in it, and also, there are multiple references to safe sleep or something of the sort...
 
Hmm, now I have gotten a kernal panic...this is starting to bum me out...looks like a trip to the Apple Store or a call to AppleCare is almost assuredly in the future....I keep putting this off....I HATE dealing with computer repairs...:eek:
 
Does the freeze up happen when you have a lot of apps open? Does the freeze mean that you can mouse around but no response from anything you click?

I have sort of the same problem, where a reinstall didn't fix it at all. When running lots of apps, the macbook becomes insanely unresponsive. Checking the Activity Monitor doesn't really clarify things for me, since there's lots of inactive RAM, (lots of page outs though) and almost 50% CPU free. I just don't get what happens and my uptime is roughly 3-5 days, always ending with a hard shutdown unfortunately.

It's bugging the hell out of me and is really putting me off wanting to upgrade to a MBP to October... :(
 
Jiddick ExRex said:
Does the freeze up happen when you have a lot of apps open? Does the freeze mean that you can mouse around but no response from anything you click?

I have sort of the same problem, where a reinstall didn't fix it at all. When running lots of apps, the macbook becomes insanely unresponsive. Checking the Activity Monitor doesn't really clarify things for me, since there's lots of inactive RAM, (lots of page outs though) and almost 50% CPU free. I just don't get what happens and my uptime is roughly 3-5 days, always ending with a hard shutdown unfortunately.

It's bugging the hell out of me and is really putting me off wanting to upgrade to a MBP to October... :(
Click to expand...

It actually seems to happen when Safari is open more often than not, especially on the freeze ups. The restarts happen whenever I put it to sleep and try to wake it up for the most part. And when it freezes, nothing works, including the mouse...
 
Programmers who really know this stuff may want to thrash me about the ears for saying so, but I'm beginning to believe that the Intel version of OSX has a poorly implemented trap for kernel panics related to hardware issues, resulting in a system freeze or reboot instead of the normal panic screen. I don't recall hearing about this with the PPC version of OSX.
 
IJ Reilly said:
Programmers who really know this stuff may want to thrash me about the ears for saying so, but I'm beginning to believe that the Intel version of OSX has a poorly implemented trap for kernel panics related to hardware issues, resulting in a system freeze or reboot instead of the normal panic screen. I don't recall hearing about this with the PPC version of OSX.
Click to expand...

so, if I understand you, what you are saying is that I have been having kernal panics all along, and the computer doesn't always react properly?
 
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