Q: Random freezing from Snow Leopard - total lock-up for about 30 seconds

Like Douglas Hall3, mine beachballs gave me some time. They stopped 3 days ago as mysteriously as they came. Although there may be a coincidence (I hate these coincidences!) the only thing I did before it stops was to delete my Boot Camp NTFS partition. The next 2 OS restarts were quite a bit longer than usual, but then I got clear skies. Now I get beachballs 1, maybe 2 times the entire day. Facing the near 20/hour from before, it's a lot better.

People getting this freezes should take the computer to a Store. Apple have to be notified in mass. Otherwise it seems just few users have the problem, and they don't raise the thread's priority. I'd love to take mine to a Store, but there's no Apple Stores here in Brazil.

I used to get spinning beach balls a lot throughout the day, but I decided to do a clean install of snow leopard and use time machine to restore my data. I get the occasional lockup still but it's not a beach ball anymore, my computer locks up but the mouse pointer remains intact.

I feel like my computer has a "virus" or is haunted. Not only do I get intermittent beach balls but I get random shut downs and whole system freezes...randomly.

Has anyone tried installing SL on a USB drive and using that instead of the internal drive? I want to say these beachball issues has something to do with a delay in accessing the internal HD...

FWIW there is a shareware program called Snow Leopard Cache Cleaner which I ran but didn't seem to have any immediate effects.

Message was edited by: New Yorka

Message was edited by: New Yorka

Just as sammwalk describes, I'm starting to have exact the same issues. I've never ever had any of these issues before with my Mac, and they just started a couple of weeks ago, with the latest days grown more rapidly. (been using the same hardware without issues for 1.5 year).

They seem to have completely random, clicking in a menu, scroll in a window or just switching between applications. It def. feels like a timeout, since everything you do gets buffered and executed directly after the freeze ends.

What really annoys me is that I can't find any log listing any error. It's like the system doesn't understand that its been frozen for 30 sec.

I did a SMC reset and I also reinstalled iTunes, since this felt like a last resort before going completely mad of all the hangups.

So far, after the SMC reset and the iTunes reinstall, I've had no hangups at all. This needs to be tested some days before I can actually be happy.

I did the clean install on my macbook pro 2006 and restored from my new imac (see below). The macbook was running great up until a glitch yesterday. I got a brief error message that a disc had been removed improperly (the only disc present was the laptop hard drive) followed by non-stop beachballs. I rebooted, resetting PRAM in the process. The macbook has been running fine again since that time. I am now thinking that SL is more sensitive to some hardware glitch that occurs than previous versions of the OS might have been. If it happens again I'll downgrade to leopard.

"My 2006 macbook pro has been victimized by this problem. I have tried just about every remedy suggested including changing hard drives. Quite recently (perhaps foolishly) I purchased a new iMac. The iMac is running SL without any problems so I am trying an experiment. I reformatted and reinstalled SL on the macbook pro. During the setup I migrated the iMac drive contents to the laptop. I will endeavor to run the laptop for awhile without making any further changes (other than the combined update to SL). If the problem recurs I believe that would indicate a hardware related issue. If it does not recur that would indicate software incompatibility somewhere. I'll keep you posted."

Brian

In my previous post I said that the beach balls had stopped. Well, they're back.

I ran SMART Utility and the overall status of my hard drive is "Failing". I'll take it for a repair and tell you what happened.

Cheers.

helped in my case. hope it fixes your problem too

Well it's about midnight over here and I finally got my mbp to run smooth and with no freezing, I deleted Windows 7 partition, repaired disk, backed up my data, I was actually about to do a clean install, but It's been nearly five hours running with no problem now, to do a test I opened all my applications (+30 - photoshop, final cut, iwork, ilife, etc...) together and it didn't freeze at all.

I hope my problem is solved, otherwise I will do a clean install, if nothing else works I will go back to Leopard.

Cheers

joarezpj wrote:
but there's no Apple Stores here in Brazil.

You can FedEx it into Apple Repair.

Call them for details.

 

DALE

 

Already done that. Thanks DALE.

These beachballs, in my case, are being caused by a faulty HD. Here's a screenshot of SMART Utility:

http://picasaweb.google.com.br/lh/photo/_IaO95XbXX7FpjRykIVkSg?feat=directlink

Check yours.

I got just one error, the following:

+*reallocated sector count*+

It's not very enlightening to say 'me too' on this thread, but 'me too'. My freezes seem to happen when I am both using Firefox and Time Machine goes into a backup process. The latter freezes, Firefox hangs as a result, then the spinning beachball of death and even, on the past couple of occasions, an error from Finder -10810 (I think), whereupon I have to do a hard restart.

I'm on a three-month old Macbook Pro with a factory install of Snow Leopard. I have to say that this continued problem is really affecting the normal pleasure I get from the Mac experience.

Does anyone know how to recreate this freezing problem? I have it, and it happens in Safari, Firefox but I don't know to re-create the incident!

Thanks

u,
What have you tried to cure this issue please?

Dale

I thought a clean install fixed some issues I was having but the spinning beach balls are back. My SMART status passes so I'm not entirely sure what is wrong right now.