Q: MBP freezes on sleep and logout
This has been driving me nuts for three weeks now, and couldn't find anybody with a similar problem in the usual forums, so here it goes...
MBP from August 2010:
2,66 GHz Intel Core i7
8 GB 1067 MHz DDR3
Intel HD Graphics 288 MB + NVIDIA GeForce GT 330M
Mavericks - OS X 10.9.5 (13F34).
(The problem first happened while running OS X 10.9.4 and continued after the update.)
The issue: when I close the lid or try logging out from any account —admin, user or guest— the system freezes. The screen goes black or freezes in the logging screen. Keyboard becomes irresponsive. Hard drive sometimes sounds as being doing something. On occasions, when closing the lid down, the system actually manages to enter sleep mode, though it might take it up to a couple of minutes, and, when opening the lid, it freezes on wake up anyway. After such freezes, on about 50% of times, the system also freezes on start up. So I have to retry several times until, for some unknown reason, it starts up "normally". Reseting the NV-RAM seems to help guarantying a restart, though I couldn't see a 100% correlation. Funny enough, the system doesn't seem to have any issue if I do a full shutdown without logging out, though it takes about double time than it used to.
That's the core of the problem, I think, because other things also started to go wrong the second after the first freeze on sleep happened. Any software that somehow has to interact with screen/video resolutions, such as VLC, Quicktime, Safari Flash Player or games that go on full screen, crash on start. Some other non-video-related programs also tend to crash or take an awful long time to start. So far, I have experienced that on Chrome, TheUnarchiver and uTorrent. To make things more interesting, all this programs seem to agree on when and when not work. So if one of them goes wrong, all of them will go wrong and I'd have to restart the system and cross my fingers. I failed to identify the apparent common root...
The fact that issues are independent of the account I log in to and that various pieces of software seem to fail together or not at all hints, I think, to a failure somewhere deeper in the system or in the hardware. I ran a hardware test and, apart form a bit worn out 4 year old battery, everything got an OK. I checked the hard drive and the permissions table and nothing popped out apart from some minor and usual errors, which got corrected. I updated from 10.9.4 to 10.9.5 —keeping users files—, the update happened, but the system froze on the first automatic restart. The problem persisted on 10.9.5, so I did another system reinstall, this time, right after reseting the power management system and NV-RAM, just in case. Again, reinstall seemed to happen without errors, but the system froze on restart. Though it came back again "normal" after doing a manual shutdown. Spent hours looking at the system logs, and couldn't find anything related to any of the multiple freezes and neither do the individual software crashes seem to leave a log (!!!).
Also, in case it may have some relation with the issue, though I doubt it, I have a Bootcamp partition with a Windows 7 Ultimate installed. It's being there for the last two years without making any trouble, running as smooth as a Window can and, as far as I can tell, unaffected by any of the problems above.
Hope somebody can give me any clues... Thanks in advance!!!
MacBook Pro, OS X Mavericks (10.9.5)
Posted on Oct 11, 2014 2:11 PM