15" MBP5,1 late 2008 has:
Latest version of El Capitan
New 8 gb OWC RAM
New 480 gb OWC SSD
1. My MBP started freezing randomly about 2 months ago. There's not even the annoying spinning beachball. The only way to get out of the frozen state is to do a hard reset (power button). Back then, my MBP had the original 4 gb RAM and 400 gb HD with Snow Leopard. Sometimes the wifi icon didn't show up. Sometimes it indicated a blank icon with an x (wifi: no hardware installed). I had tons of pictures in my HD so only about 95 gb were available. I had Photoshop and Lightroom installed but I was hardly using them during that time. The freezing seemed to occur usually while I was surfing the 'Net.
2. I took my MBP to the Genius Bar. Tech performed a disk check/repair and resets (NVRAM, etc). There were disk errors. Tech said I might want to replace the HD which was going bad, maybe the wifi card needed to be replaced too. He erased my HD and installed El Cap. When I got home, MBP ran ok for awhile but then started freezing again. I hadn't even restored my files into it yet.
3. So I ordered the 8 gb RAM & 480 gb SSD from OWC. (Since installing the wifi card wouldn't be easy, I decided I'd take the MBP to a shop some other time, buy the wifi card there and have a pro install it for me.) I installed them and then went back to the Genius Bar to have them install El Cap.
4. I had high hopes for my new SSD. Unfortunately, the exact same freezing problem happened even though I hadn't restored my files into it yet.
5. I Googled the freezing problem here in the Macrumors forums and elsewhere in the web. My misery has a lot of company but no solution for me.
6. Somebody said it was Chrome that was the problem. I usually use Firefox and sometimes Safari.
I already reset NVRAM, PRAM, SMC.
7. It's easy to say just buy a new MBP. However, I found out that even a few not-so-old and hours-old and few-weeks-old MBs had freezing problems. So I'd like to know first what's causing my MBP to freeze and any steps I might be able to do about it.
8. Is the wifi card really bad or is it something else that might be causing it to malfunction?
Latest version of El Capitan
New 8 gb OWC RAM
New 480 gb OWC SSD
1. My MBP started freezing randomly about 2 months ago. There's not even the annoying spinning beachball. The only way to get out of the frozen state is to do a hard reset (power button). Back then, my MBP had the original 4 gb RAM and 400 gb HD with Snow Leopard. Sometimes the wifi icon didn't show up. Sometimes it indicated a blank icon with an x (wifi: no hardware installed). I had tons of pictures in my HD so only about 95 gb were available. I had Photoshop and Lightroom installed but I was hardly using them during that time. The freezing seemed to occur usually while I was surfing the 'Net.
2. I took my MBP to the Genius Bar. Tech performed a disk check/repair and resets (NVRAM, etc). There were disk errors. Tech said I might want to replace the HD which was going bad, maybe the wifi card needed to be replaced too. He erased my HD and installed El Cap. When I got home, MBP ran ok for awhile but then started freezing again. I hadn't even restored my files into it yet.
3. So I ordered the 8 gb RAM & 480 gb SSD from OWC. (Since installing the wifi card wouldn't be easy, I decided I'd take the MBP to a shop some other time, buy the wifi card there and have a pro install it for me.) I installed them and then went back to the Genius Bar to have them install El Cap.
4. I had high hopes for my new SSD. Unfortunately, the exact same freezing problem happened even though I hadn't restored my files into it yet.
5. I Googled the freezing problem here in the Macrumors forums and elsewhere in the web. My misery has a lot of company but no solution for me.
6. Somebody said it was Chrome that was the problem. I usually use Firefox and sometimes Safari.
I already reset NVRAM, PRAM, SMC.
7. It's easy to say just buy a new MBP. However, I found out that even a few not-so-old and hours-old and few-weeks-old MBs had freezing problems. So I'd like to know first what's causing my MBP to freeze and any steps I might be able to do about it.
8. Is the wifi card really bad or is it something else that might be causing it to malfunction?