I got this new Mac Mini last month so it is running Mavericks. It has 1 TB memory and 16 GB RAM. Screensaver was on today, I typed in my password, and it froze up. Specifically the screensaver stopped moving around, and the window for typing a password disappeared. The mouse cursor was still moveable but there was nothing to click on. I had to press the power button to shut down and again to turn on the computer. I notice somebody posted that they thought Safari might be causing similar problems. I did indeed have Safari running at the time, as well as several other programs. Is Safari really a problem and should I be careful not to have Safari running when I put my computer into screen saver?
I don't know what to tell you "Old Chap". There shouldn't be any problems running Safari and the screen saver. I've just got a new Mac Mini myself and I'm using a 46" Samsung flat screen tv as the monitor. I prefer FireFox as a browser, but occasionally I use Safari too. Many times the screen saver has started and after an hour the monitor will sleep. Move my mouse a little and everything starts back up.
First thing I had to do was add ram to bring it up to 16 GB. Suppose you could say that I'm using it as a Media Center.
To also add to the mix, the Mini is routed through a Onkyo stereo receiver that switches the tv between a PC laptop, the Mac Mini, an Amazon Fire TV and a Chrome Cast dongle. I'm using my wireless to stream Netflix and Amazon Prime to it. I also run Windows 7 with Parallels for Mac.
You would think that if
anyone was going to have a problem, it would be me, but everything has been working perfectly! I haven't had any problems with freezing.
If I were you, I would erase the hard drive and install Mavericks again. Do all the updates, and if that didn't solve the problem and since it's a new Mini, I would go to an Apple store and see if they could help.
I had to return a new Mac Pro laptop years ago when they first came out and after 4 or 5 trips to the repair shop, it was still acting wonky. I told them (Apple) that I couldn't trust it anymore and they gave me a new computer.
Good luck and I hope you find an answer to your problem. Wish I could have helped more.
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I forgot. A lot of these freezes people are having with older Macs that ran fine with Snow Leopard and Lion are due to the faulty .kext files for the Ati graphics card. Instead of the original ATI .kext files that came with the computer, Apple is constantly updating them with AMD .kext files and it's causing problems with freezing.
Since I replaced the new files with the older ones, I haven't had ANY problems with freezing on my early 2008 iMac running Mavericks.