Hi,
Since about 1 week, I'm experiencing a lot of crashes with my 2018 MacMini.
I purchased the machine new about a month ago, and installed 2x 16gb ram modules myself. For the first 3-4 weeks, everything was running fine with no crashes. Mac OS Mojave (which is running from an external 1TB m2 SSD), the internal SSD has Catalina on it (which I want to delete as soon as the Mac runs smoothly. Don't want to run Catalina because of some software incompatibility).
To give you a few examples for the crashes I had:
1) Yesterday evening, I powered up, went straight to Safari and started watching Netflix. 10-15min later, the picture froze, the Mac powered off and rebooted (on its own). Another 10-15min later: the same thing happened again. At that time I thought it may be a problem with the ram, BUT...
2) Today, the machine did a number of "soft crashes": Power up, go to Safari (Spotify is running in the background), do some research and – boom – Safari quits, a few seconds later Spotify quits (system clock is still running), and another few seconds later the Finder quits --> restart.
This makes me think that it may NOT be the ram.
3) Sometimes the machine doesn't crash, but performance is very sluggish... beachballing most of the time, so I end up doing a restart anyway. Quite a lot of times, I can't move the mouse pointer with my Wacom tablet (it freezes), but trackpad is OK.
Sometimes I have 1-2 hours between crashes, sometimes they happen just a few minutes after a restart. In nearly all crash scenarios, I only ever had minor software running (system / browser / iTunes etc), no Photoshop. The first EVER crash I experienced was after installing DaVinci Resolve and using it for 1/2h or so. At the time I thought this crash may have been normal, because DaVinci needs an eGPU (which I don't have yet).
I tried resetting the PRAM, but that didn't help. Tried installing Memtest86+ onto an external HD, but it doesn't appear in the boot selector. Tried pressing "D" after restart to get to the diagnostic tool – no success.
I kept the original 2x8gb ram, so could bring the machine back to Apple. But I'd prefer to trouble-shoot myself. Apple may blame the external System-HD anyway (which I don't think is the cause, because it worked fine for the first 3 weeks).
I've owned many Macs ever since the mid-90s, but with this one, I really don't know where to start troubleshooting...
Any ideas?
Thanks a lot!!
Since about 1 week, I'm experiencing a lot of crashes with my 2018 MacMini.
I purchased the machine new about a month ago, and installed 2x 16gb ram modules myself. For the first 3-4 weeks, everything was running fine with no crashes. Mac OS Mojave (which is running from an external 1TB m2 SSD), the internal SSD has Catalina on it (which I want to delete as soon as the Mac runs smoothly. Don't want to run Catalina because of some software incompatibility).
To give you a few examples for the crashes I had:
1) Yesterday evening, I powered up, went straight to Safari and started watching Netflix. 10-15min later, the picture froze, the Mac powered off and rebooted (on its own). Another 10-15min later: the same thing happened again. At that time I thought it may be a problem with the ram, BUT...
2) Today, the machine did a number of "soft crashes": Power up, go to Safari (Spotify is running in the background), do some research and – boom – Safari quits, a few seconds later Spotify quits (system clock is still running), and another few seconds later the Finder quits --> restart.
This makes me think that it may NOT be the ram.
3) Sometimes the machine doesn't crash, but performance is very sluggish... beachballing most of the time, so I end up doing a restart anyway. Quite a lot of times, I can't move the mouse pointer with my Wacom tablet (it freezes), but trackpad is OK.
Sometimes I have 1-2 hours between crashes, sometimes they happen just a few minutes after a restart. In nearly all crash scenarios, I only ever had minor software running (system / browser / iTunes etc), no Photoshop. The first EVER crash I experienced was after installing DaVinci Resolve and using it for 1/2h or so. At the time I thought this crash may have been normal, because DaVinci needs an eGPU (which I don't have yet).
I tried resetting the PRAM, but that didn't help. Tried installing Memtest86+ onto an external HD, but it doesn't appear in the boot selector. Tried pressing "D" after restart to get to the diagnostic tool – no success.
I kept the original 2x8gb ram, so could bring the machine back to Apple. But I'd prefer to trouble-shoot myself. Apple may blame the external System-HD anyway (which I don't think is the cause, because it worked fine for the first 3 weeks).
I've owned many Macs ever since the mid-90s, but with this one, I really don't know where to start troubleshooting...
Any ideas?
Thanks a lot!!
