New 17" MBP Hangs

Monitor your CPU and memory usage in your Activity Monitor. If some process is using excessive amounts of CPU power and/or your memory is getting low, this could slow things down.

Also, how full is your hard drive?

Dave M.
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Do you have the 500 GB 7200 RPM drive option? If so you may be experiencing the hard drive lag:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2049659&tstart=0

seems i have the same problem on a brand new mbp 13".
it lags in safari and when i play movies, i get the beachball thing for some seconds and the its all back to normal.

i get the same problem when i move the mbp around not very fast and i hear some sound from the harddrive but i can´t say what it is.

Message was edited by: lindemeyer

I have the same problem on a brand new Unibody 17". I have the 500GB 5400RPM hard drive and 4GB of RAM. With the hangs and the lag this computer feels SIGNIFICANTLY slower than my previous ~2.5 year old 17" MacBook Pro which had a 160GB 7200 RPM hard drive. Unfortunately I dropped that computer and it broke, otherwise I would return this and go back to using my old one. The hanging happens constantly and really affects my use of the computer. Videos stutter and don't play smoothly and safari hangs for a few seconds all the time. What could be causing this? If the performance of this hd is so bad I'm going to go out and buy an SSD... I really don't think the hd is the problem though. I hope this issue gets resolved soon.

I don't hear the sound you're talking about. I did an xbench test and got these results:

Disk Test 45.02
Sequential 78.38
Uncached Write 116.13 71.30 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 56.44 31.94 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 58.22 17.04 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 132.81 66.75 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 31.58
Uncached Write 12.04 1.27 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 67.10 21.48 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 54.23 0.38 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 97.61 18.11 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Are these numbers normal? Even as I was writing this post Safari hung for 10 seconds with the beach ball. I'm leaving to go out of the country tomorrow for work for 10 days and using this computer is close to unbearable. Ugh.

YES! Finally a thread on this. I've been experiencing this on my uMBP 17 since I got it in early 2009. At first I thought it was the 500GB 7200 Seagate drive, but I still have these pauses even after I swapped in a Hitachi 500GB 5400 HDD.

It's really infuriating. Sometimes it's just a few apps, sometimes it's the entire system, including the clock in the Menu Bar. Had it to the Genius bar where they ran hardware tests, but they found nothing.

There's something squirrelly about these new MBPs. Could it be the nVidia chipsets?

Whatever it is, Apple, you need to fix this ASAP!

It happens whether or not I'm on a plug or battery power. I have the Hitachi 500 GB 5400 RPM drive. I have just installed Windows 7 with Boot Camp and in 4 hours of use there is absolutely no lag or any of the problems I am experiencing with OSX... this is the first Mac I've had with any problem like this and I switched in 2001 with the Ti PowerBook. I think it must be a software problem at this point.

Part of my backup routine includes making a clone of the drive. When I run this exact clone on my older 15" 2.33 GHz MBP, it doesn't have any issues with pausing, hiccups or freezing. In many ways, it seems faster than this new MBP.

I don't think it's the OS, it's got to be the hardware.

I have the exact same issues with the latest 15" model. Drives me nuts. Somehow it is not so bad though the last week or so.... (knocks on wood..)

Here is my thread, created in the 'old macbook' by accident: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=9795272#9795272

Message was edited by: bliekp

Got the exact same problem on my MBP : iTunes is playing away when I hear "grind grind grind" - 3 writing to disk grinds, repeated while the beach ball spins for a while - and the music STOPS; the grind is like the sound that tells PC owners they need more RAM to handle Vista. I've got 2.someodd Gigs of RAM in the MBP, but I'm using the MB because the hang is just too horrendous on my MBP!! Considering the # of people with this issue, lets hope we can get a troubleshooting process for this one. I just uninstalled PostGreSQL8 and I guess am going to uninstall other back-end stuff until I find out what the deevil is using my MBP to grind coffee beans. Kindof a pain because I need to demonstrate a new Drupal site to a client over the weekend.

Thanks in advance for any help or ideas. I'll let y'all know if I find a back-end culprit.

Oh and PS, it doesn't happen when I'm logged in as Root User. Ray Charles foghorns on and on without lag... Oh yeah! Hope this helps. Ain't no solution though, that's for sure 🙂