Snow Leopard freezes over time

Thanks for the response. It's only been a day with most everyday apps left running. No lock up yet. I'll report back in a few days. If no lock up, I'm reinstalling Parallels 4 and Windows XP Pro. Turning off all access to peripherals on Windows side. I don't need it since sharing files is a snap.

I upgraded from Leopard to Snow Leopard when it was released and the OS was not stable; freezes, crashes, UI problems, etc. Yesterday I decided to do a fresh install and I did. Now it is even worse, my Snow Leopard clean installation (no restore nothing) keeps freezing on me. I have to ssh and reboot. I tried killing multipe processes but that does not help. I think it has to do with the WindowsServer process.

Do you have by chance any Photoshop product ? I had the same issue and was going crazy. I don't know if it is reseting the RAMs, resetting the SMC the new version of iTunes or patching some Adobe Photoshop files that helped ... But its been 3 weeks that I havent had a crash now instead of at least one a day before.

Through the weeks I finally found out what is happening with my iMac and why it keeps crashing on me. It seems that whenever the iMac puts the harddrives to sleep on his own, it's unable to wake it back up.

If I put the iMac to sleep by hand the harddrive will wake up just fine, but it falls asleep on its own I'll get the spinning ball of death.

Any Ideas on this? For now I just disabled the spinning down of the harddrive in the Energy-Saving preferences...

I forgot to update. After one week of constant use, no more lock up.


http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=10521543#10521543

I haven't had any issues for over a week, either. The only thing that I can think of that's changed is that Apple pushed out an iTunes update. I may have tweaked the energy saver preferences, but that's about it.

I'm wondering if they included something else with that package to correct an issue that they'd rather not admit was happening? With the recent AppleTV 3.0 issues and forthcoming Snow Leopard update, there may be some serious quality control issues in Cupertino.

Just installed the 10.6.2 update and DirectoryServices still crashes when your 10 min restart daemon isn't running. Looks like your prediction is right, we'll just have to hope for a fix in 10.6.3, have you heard any more info from Apple?

I went back to Leopard again: my Macbook Pro works!!!
Snow Leopard was a disaster for me and my Macbook Pro 3.1

See my posts

You should have given 10.6.2 a try. I had many freeze issues too (at least once a day). But after reseting SMC, and the RAMs, updating iTunes, I am not sure what exactly the problem was, but after analyzing my logs every day, I have solved every single error and warning that I saw in my system logs. It seems to have worked at some point its stopped freezing about 4 weeks ago now. Don't give up. When it works SL is a very nice OS and I wouldn't want to go back to Leopard now.

I upgraded my Leopard to Snow Leopard just about a week ago, and I had? this problem with Photoshop CS4 and with Mail, now I disabled Growl and everything seems to be working ok now. I hope this problem doesn't come back.

Gr.

Hi Guys,

Has anyone found a solution for this yet? I can't bare my Mac freezing over time, it's annoying.

I have updated to the lastest version 10.6.2, but it's still freezing when I use iPhoto, Photoshop CS4, etc. I did an upgrade from Leopard to Snow, anyone has any suggestion to diagnose what the problem may be in my case?

Message was edited by: lightt

Well I have just 'upgraded' to 10.6.2 and it has made the machine unusable if left for more than a few minutes without being used. The screen goes black and the clock appears, as if the screen saver is about to start, even thought I have no screen saver setup to start that quickly. If I move the mouse, the black screen disappears down to the bottom corner of the screen and you get the grey border around the edge as if you have used the 'Desktop' hot corner, but the mouse is not visible on the screen, you can work out about where it should be from what is happening on the screen, but you cant do anything, you can't click on anything and the only way out is to press and hold the power button to force a re start.
It also seems impossible to log on as another user from User Fast Switching, the new user name appears and the password box, but when you click on the password entry box, you can't get a cursor in the box to type anything.

So going to be using the old Windows PC for the next few days till I can get around to doing a full clean install of 10.5.6 Leopard and all the software again, and I thought all this agro had been left behind when I moved away from Windows.

story of my life

I just started having these freezing problems and have been running Snow Leopard since it came out. Today is December 16th, 2009, and I noticed there was a software update from apple that turned out to include a firmware upgrade. I ran that and haven't had any freezing since...

I've been having this freeing problem for a long time now. I'm not too tech savvy, but I've tried a lot of different "fixes" I have found on this forum, and others like it. I finally brought my Mac in to get serviced, and the technician couldn't find anything wrong at all. I even went in and tried to make it freeze, but it worked like a champ. So I came home, hooked it back up, and within an hour it started freezing again playing iTunes. I noticed some people had success by turning off the wifi, so I tried that, but again the freezing occurred. I finally called my internet provider, and they ran some tests, and discovered I had a 10% packet loss from my modem. They came in today and replaced the modem, as well as fixed a weak splitter, and my Mac is running beautifully. It used to freeze up if I was running iTunes. Scrolling through the album artwork was an almost guaranteed freeze. iPhoto was another major freezer. But today, no problems at all. To test it out, I played 3 movies at once, along with iTunes running, and after an hour, everything was running perfectly, and even the back of the computer was much cooler. I then started up 7 or 8 programs to run at the same time as the 3 movies and itunes, and no problems at all. I have no idea why a bad internet connection would have been the cause (I hope Im not jinxing myself), but once I had mine fixed, all my freezing problems stopped. Granted, its only been a few hours now, but it feels a lot less sluggish, and NO freezing. Check out your modems people! You never know. When you're at the point I was at, you'll try anything.

GOOD LUCK!