Unable to shutdown

[hehe299792458]

Sometimes, when I try to turn off my computer, it doesn't shut down. It would either quit all programs (including finder) and just show the wallpaper, or it would go to the blue-ish screen (a normal phase in the shutdown process) and the wheel on the bottom would spin forever. In either case, the computer just freezes at that point and I have to power cycle it manually.

I noticed that this occurs more frequently if I don't restart it for a couple of days (3-4 days max), but my friends are able to go on without a restart for 2-3 weeks at a time. I tried reinstalling OS X to no avail. I now also quit all my programs manually before I try to shutdown (don't know if they affect anything) but that does not appear to help.

EDIT: I'm using a late 2008 MBP with OS X 10.6.5 (10H574)

 

[palyons]

I too have a MacBook Pro Late 2008 15.4" 2.4GHz (A1286). From time-to-time I experience shutdown issues, but nothing too serious really.

I think the problem is certain programs like Firefox, VLC, other resource hogs take up a lot of memory and/or CPU power and make the system take longer to shutdown.

Probably not entirely accurate, but I'm sure there's some truth behind it.

 

[hehe299792458]

I too have a MacBook Pro Late 2008 15.4" 2.4GHz (A1286). From time-to-time I experience shutdown issues, but nothing too serious really.

I think the problem is certain programs like Firefox, VLC, other resource hogs take up a lot of memory and/or CPU power and make the system take longer to shutdown.

Probably not entirely accurate, but I'm sure there's some truth behind it.

I run Firefox all the time, so it's quite possible that has something to do with it. However, I left my computer for half an hour and it still didn't shutdown. The wheel just kept spinning.


I should add that ironically, this only started to happen once I upgraded to 10.6, Snow Leopard. When I was on 10.5, the version that the laptop shipped with, it was all fine. And they said 10.6 was supposed to increase stability....

 

[benhollberg]

Although I don't have that problem I know my father iMac has something similar. It is a 2006 model, if you try to put it to sleep the screen will go off and then come back on after a few seconds. If you keep doing this it will stay asleep after doing it three times. Every time it does this, and every time it finally goes to sleep after three times. I also don't think it will go to sleep on it's own, maybe after it tries three times though.

 

[hehe299792458]

Although I don't have that problem I know my father iMac has something similar. It is a 2006 model, if you try to put it to sleep the screen will go off and then come back on after a few seconds. If you keep doing this it will stay asleep after doing it three times. Every time it does this, and every time it finally goes to sleep after three times. I also don't think it will go to sleep on it's own, maybe after it tries three times though.

Did you ever find a solution to your problem?

 

[Ikkei]

I seem to have solved this issue.

Problem: My iMac wouldn't shut down, stuck on the blue screen with the rolling wheel. Forever. (startup wasn't an issue, 20-30 seconds from 'dong' to a functional desktop.)

Idea: Suspecting MacOS was "looking for" something to no avail, I thought of Time Machine: I use an external USB HDD that I plug in just once a day or so, and it's usually offline when I boot up or restart the iMac. Well, no longer.

Solution: Simply having my Time Machine disk available to MacOSX when I shutdown/restart does the trick: the iMac goes black within 10 seconds.

Hope that'll work for others too!