MacBook Pro crashing

[manPrime]

Hi everyone, I have a 2010 MacBook Pro however for the past few weeks it keeps crashing, the spinning wheel comes and I can't do anything. Have tried waiting over an hour and it still didn't respond. I still have 3 months of apple care left and was wondering what if anything apple would be able to do to fix this problem.
Thanks manPrime

 

[xShane]

Hi everyone, I have a 2010 MacBook Pro however for the past few weeks it keeps crashing, the spinning wheel comes and I can't do anything. Have tried waiting over an hour and it still didn't respond. I still have 3 months of apple care left and was wondering what if anything apple would be able to do to fix this problem.
Thanks manPrime

Does it happen when you're running any particular software? Can you replicate the problem?

 

[manPrime]

Does it happen when you're running any particular software? Can you replicate the problem?

I don't use it for much, only use chrome, word, excel and occasionally minecraft. It seems to happen when I have either a lot of tabs open or have chrome and word/excel open

 

[xShane]

I don't use it for much, only use chrome, word, excel and occasionally minecraft. It seems to happen when I have either a lot of tabs open or have chrome and word/excel open

Sounds like it might be Flash and/or a memory leak. I've noticed Firefox has a memory leak bug where sometimes everything freezes up and by the time I open Activity Monitor Firefox starts using +200MB more RAM per second. In your case, it sounds like a possible Chrome issue.

You should try to monitor Activity Monitor before your next "freeze" and see if anything starts looking suspicious.

 

[manPrime]

Thanks for the advice will do. So no point in taking in to apple?

 

[xShane]

Thanks for the advice will do. So no point in taking in to apple?

At this point, it's impossible to tell. That's entirely your decision.

 

[JPMurphy]

I had a similar issue a couple times last year (I have the same habit of leaving a ton of Chrome tabs open); it wasn't a total crash for me, though, as it eventually came back from being non-responsive after leaving it alone. (The cursor turned into the beach ball, and I could move it around the screen, but couldn't interact with anything.) I upgraded to 4GB RAM and haven't had the issue since.

I like to open a terminal window and run "top" in it to keep an eye on things. If it's visible next time this happens, you should get a clue about what's using up your memory. It's also worth trying to SSH in, if you have that enabled; if you can get in, you might be able to kill processes to get things working again.