Snow Leopard freezes over time

UPDATE

Freezing resumed, hard drive officially failing. Getting a new one tomorrow. Found a lot of people who have a 500 GB WD drive are having similar freezing issues.

I just upgraded to Snow Leopard (10.6) and all my apps (Photoshop, Dreamweaver, iTunes, Filezilla, Mozilla Firefox.. almost any app!) keeps freezing after a while. The beach ball pops up and it stops responding! My brother did the same upgrade using the same family pack upgrade cd which I used but it isn't happening to him! He has the same computer too :S Anyway, is there any way to fix this?? PLEASE HELP!! I even updated to the latest everything using Software Update (Now I'm on 10.6.2) APPLE PLEASE FIX THIS THROUGH AN UPDATE OR SOMETHING!! DON'T LET ME REGRET UPGRADING! I LOVE ALL APPLE STUFF!!

I am having the same problem with a fresh install too. These freezes are bad. Like you cannot hit anything...no mouse/keyboard. Same thing over tiem and more apps that are open etc. And i have a 1 year old machine with 4 gig ram. I also have just choppy/sluggish performance, beachball "moments" and I am seriously considering going back to leopard. This is like...sad to say...worse than xp lockups. As far as switching/creating new user ids...fine...but if it worked ok under leopard then well....somebody did poor testing...especially when apple touts SL as this fast upgrade...when in my opinion safari runs worse. C'mon apple!

I am hoping to clarify this problem and be referred to the right place for assistance.

PROBLEM: My computer (and 3 friends as well) macbook pro's crash about every 3hrs if connected via wireless. They DO NOT crash if connected via ethernet or bluetooth/usb iphone tethering.

ATTEMPTS TO FIX: completely reinstalled snow leopard from scratch- crashes returned after a few days. Replaced the wireless card and entire display-half of my macbook pro via the Genius Bar - no noticeable change.

It appears that an application places a blocking network call then each application that places a network call after that crashes-- causing the entire system to freeze in ~30 seconds from 1st application crash. This is not a kernel panic-- to restart the machine i am forced to hold down the power button until the machine shuts off. There is nothing odd in the console on restart.

for a more complete explanation please visit http://ask.metafilter.com/142165/Ugly-OSX-Snow-Leopard-Freeze-at-a-loss

applications usually open during crash: itunes, firefox and adium

jbjoret,

I have EXACTLY the same problem on my iMac with Firewire800 appearing to be the cause of the "hang". By "hang" I mean that Time Machine hangs with a spinning arrow every day or so, sometimes when coming out of iMac Sleep, sometimes when I'm just watching a streaming TV show on the browser or video on iTunes. Eventually, everything else comes to a hang condition. I've also had full system hangs with nothing but the pointer moving, unable to do a shutdown or anything.

I have an active incident with Apple and have had direct conversations with two senior support reps who have been discussing my problem with "Engineering".

Powering off my external FW800 drive ALWAYS recovers from the hang.

Apple Support are currently having me unistall VMWare Fusion 3, but I think they are just shooting in the dark.

Message was edited by: allan_vancouver

I agree, I did not switch from being a PC user for over 15 years to a Mac in order to do a bunch of regular troubleshooting. I have this freezing problem on a regular basis and it has cost me dearly in terms of money, time, productivity, and just generally enjoying what started as a most satisfying relationship with my Mac. I have now started to use it for "serious" work and it goes south on a regular basis. I never had this kind of trouble with a PC and am now into 2 months of an open case with Apple support to try and resolve this issue.

My advice is to not mess around with this OS misbehavior. Apple makes big claims about the durability of their operating systems but since I upgraded to Snow Leopard my system has been falling all over itself and they can't yet even give me an idea as to what causes it.

My suggestion is to open cases and get them to deal with it. If we all muddle around doing our own tech support it will not get the bandwidth it deserves. I was a support engineer for 20 years. I spent the extra money this time for an iMac so as to enjoy my computing experience and get a quality tool to pursue work and hobbies. I just want my system to work as advertised and to "use" it to do satisfying things. If I want to tinker around I'll buy an old motorcycle.