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Should I be worried?

N

NXTMIKE

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Nov 11, 2008
386
0
Canada
Ok, so my MacBook is just under 2 weeks old...and it froze twice already.

I was running a bunch of Apple built apps (mail, safari, Pages, etc...) in the background, and the iTunes visualizer was on playing my songs. Twice, the MacBook would hang with the whole computer frozen and the song sounding like a broken record player. This happened twice, same situation causing me to perform a cold reboot.

Should I be worried and bring it to the Genius Bar, or am I just being a bit too pushy on the computer with running 3-5 apps and the visualizer at the same time?

FYI, its the new Aluminum MacBook, 2 gigs RAM, 250 GB HD

Thanks.
 
NXTMIKE said:
Ok, so my MacBook is just under 2 weeks old...and it froze twice already.

I was running a bunch of Apple built apps (mail, safari, Pages, etc...) in the background, and the iTunes visualizer was on playing my songs. Twice, the MacBook would hang with the whole computer frozen and the song sounding like a broken record player. This happened twice, same situation causing me to perform a cold reboot.

Should I be worried and bring it to the Genius Bar, or am I just being a bit too pushy on the computer with running 3-5 apps and the visualizer at the same time?

FYI, its the new Aluminum MacBook, 2 gigs RAM, 250 GB HD

Thanks.
Click to expand...

Maybe you just pushed it beyond a little. However, I had iTunes running and Fusion at the same time (Visualizer on) and no lag. Try leaving your MB on for the whole night. That way cron scripts can map out you Mac and it will become a bit snappier.

Another thing might be you topped out your 2 GB of Ram. Check Activity Monitor and if you see page outs and swap on anything higher than 0, then you should really look into upgrading your Ram to 4 GB.
 
I'd say swing it by the genius bar if you're close to an apple store, you're not pushing it that hard... mind you it's probably a software problem, not hardware. Were you running something flash based in Safari ?
 
Use the Activity Monitor

Open the programs you usually use and check the memory / CPU usage using the activity monitor before it starts to hang/lockup. If you are nowhere near maxing out your system, then you might want to look into reinstalling some of the apps and or do some more trouble shooting.
 
paolo- said:
I'd say swing it by the genius bar if you're close to an apple store, you're not pushing it that hard... mind you it's probably a software problem, not hardware. Were you running something flash based in Safari ?
Click to expand...

I agree- something's not right. There's no way your computer should do that given what you were running.
 
jav6454 said:
Try leaving your MB on for the whole night. That way cron scripts can map out you Mac and it will become a bit snappier.
Click to expand...

Pardon my ignorance. What are cron scripts? Making things run snappier is something I always have an interest in. Thanks in advance!:)
 
GimmeSlack12 said:
Pushing what? Its not a car. It's not like the engine needs to be broken in. If it's not working right then something's wrong.
Click to expand...

Not necessarily. If the OP is trying to get the computer to process more than it can process at a given time, then there could be some performance issues without something necessarily being "wrong" with it. That's why I suggested operating without the visualizer, since that would relieve some of the load on the CPU, to see if it helps with the problem. If turning off the visualizer is enough to make a difference, he'd notice within a week or two of normal use.
 
petermcphee said:
Pardon my ignorance. What are cron scripts? Making things run snappier is something I always have an interest in. Thanks in advance!:)
Click to expand...

There are built in scripts that run daily, weekly and monthly. They're scheduled to run at 3:15am (daily), 3:15am Saturdays (weekly) and 5:30am (first of the month). They do some maintenance jobs like clean up logs.

If your Mac is off at those times, the jobs won't be run then, but they will be run the next time you start your Mac.

They don't use crond (the standard UNIX scheduling daemon) - instead they use Apple's launchd.
 
Tomorrow said:
Not necessarily. If the OP is trying to get the computer to process more than it can process at a given time, then there could be some performance issues without something necessarily being "wrong" with it. That's why I suggested operating without the visualizer, since that would relieve some of the load on the CPU, to see if it helps with the problem. If turning off the visualizer is enough to make a difference, he'd notice within a week or two of normal use.
Click to expand...

I'm not trying to write-off your suggestion. But what should be reviewed is if the Hard drive is not working right, or if the machine is over-heating, possibly bad RAM. The workload on the processor is not generally a symptom of freezing.

EDIT: In the end I don't think there's much to be worried about. Freezes happen.
 
GimmeSlack12 said:
I'm not trying to write-off your suggestion. But what should be reviewed is if the Hard drive is not working right, or if the machine is over-heating, possibly bad RAM.
Click to expand...

I'll definitely second that - a hardware problem could definitely cause the same symptoms. Maybe it was just the optimist in me hoping it was just an overload situation :)
 
I've gotten the same problem on my Windows laptop. I think then, that it's a problem with iTunes, as it happens when I sync my iPhone. Visualizers and syncing take a lot from iTunes, even without the music. Just my thought.
 
the "broken record sound" is the sound of the DAC's going out of sync due to clock error.. its jitter, but heavy heavy jittering, probably few thousand samples per second off.
and as far as i know mbp's dont have their own clocks, relying on the cpu clock to sync theirs :)
have you checked the temps of your CPU?

and when i tried the visualizer last night, the CPU temps went very high in a jiffy :) it didnt kneel but it increased cpu usage much.
perhaps it has overheated causing it to kneel.
install onyx to run the scripts and install iStat to check it is heats too much

also might be bad ram perhaps, when computer starts paging the disk activity goes up up and away and so does the cpu usage at the same time.
and if your disk has little to no space and is cluttered heavily..
+check the activity monitor if there isnt something in your background processes that is hogging the cpu
 
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