Spontaneous restart?

[jent]

I have a 2.0GHz MacBook with 2GB of RAM. It is starting to feel a bit slow, but it runs well and I don't do much that's too processor intensive. I had a few tabs open in Safari, iTunes, and Mail.app. My MacBook restarted without warning, which in over four years of ownership has never happened. It's running Mac OS X 10.6.6 and generally runs smooth and reliable. Any ideas as to what happened?

 

[Peachiihime]

I have a 2.0GHz MacBook with 2GB of RAM. It is starting to feel a bit slow, but it runs well and I don't do much that's too processor intensive. I had a few tabs open in Safari, iTunes, and Mail.app. My MacBook restarted without warning, which in over four years of ownership has never happened. It's running Mac OS X 10.6.6 and generally runs smooth and reliable. Any ideas as to what happened?

MacBooks are quite notorious for random restarts/shutdowns. It's happened about twice to me. It might be that something running in the background is taking up a lot of the CPU. Finder also does it sometimes. If you go to Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor you will be able to see what processes are running and how much cpu they're using. Maybe a screenshot of that would help?

 

[jent]

MacBooks are quite notorious for random restarts/shutdowns. It's happened about twice to me. It might be that something running in the background is taking up a lot of the CPU. Finder also does it sometimes. If you go to Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor you will be able to see what processes are running and how much cpu they're using. Maybe a screenshot of that would help?

It just happened again, but I wasn't actively using the computer. I had the Finder and Safari open, but no pages loaded, then I went to read. After fifteen minutes, it restarted. Can I somehow remedy this?

 

[Sadaharu]

yeah - this has been happening to my pre-unibody macbook pro 10.6.7 fairly frequently. anyone have a solution?

 

[DockMac]

Keynote

Using Snow Leopard, I got spontaneous restarts when hitting PLAY on Keynote Presentations. I was luckily enough to have it only happen during rehersals and not the real thing. Have no idea what it was.

Oh yeah, Black Macbook Late 2006.

 

[ViPhone]

MacBooks are quite notorious for random restarts/shutdowns. It's happened about twice to me. It might be that something running in the background is taking up a lot of the CPU. Finder also does it sometimes. If you go to Applications > Utilities > Activity Monitor you will be able to see what processes are running and how much cpu they're using. Maybe a screenshot of that would help?

Agreed. You might also want to check how much memory you're using. Could be too little, which will cause major problems.

Buy yeah, they just do that a lot.

 

[DJLC]

Mine has done this off and on for all 4 years I've had it. Sometimes it has a heavy load, other times it doesn't. Never have figured out why. I haven't encountered this issue for several months.