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

Help me please!
I had
my ram upgraded by 1 gb at the apple approved shop. I had a new battery also. They then put my snow leopard on for me Inc iLife .
My MacBook seemed ok, but it took a while to shut down a few times and sometimes wouldent shut down unless I used the start/off button.  I went away for a week so didn’t touch it at all. I installed a new printer when I got back, wireless, Epsom stylus sx515 w
it didn’t go on easily, would do scan copy but no print. After Reading that I should have uninstalled the drivers for the old printer befor I put the new printer on I did the uninstall of the old ones then the new ones then re installed the new ones. All worked. But since then my MacBook kept crashing. Frequently so had to use the button to turn off. I thought I’ll take off the printer so uninstalled it but the MacBook just kept on crashing. I tried the test user account I have on my MacBook which is pure. Was a bit better but after 20 mins it crashed also. I thought ok I’ll try disc utility and do disc repair, but that was unavaable so I did disc verify. No better but said no problem though. So I thought ok I’ll reinstall snow leopard . It wouldn’t do it. So I thought ok I’ll take it back to tiger and use the original disc. That was going ok, then after I put in disc 2 when asked it soon crashed. Now the disc is stuck will not eject and it’s crashed! What do I do please? I know I should have just taken it back to the shop where they installed the ram etc.

I have tried Disk Utility, Smart Utility, TechTool & Disk Warrior. All give the drive a pass. I want to try SpinRite but I need to put the drive in a PC for that and since the server is in almost continuous use, that is very difficult.

I am presently in the process of doing a clean install on a separate external usb drive to see if the original drive is the problem. Again, getting a time to do this on the machine is not easy.

Hi Denise Clark;

If that were my Mac, I would not bother attempting to fix it myself but would simply take it back and have the service center fix it.

Allan

Hi Alan
thanks for your advice. I have just got back from having my mac looked at at the apple approved retailer, (where the ram and battery were fitted recently) They think my graphics card has gone. They offered to send it away and check that it is for sure. If it is so the final bill will be about £600 !
Does any body know if this could have been caused by adding extra ram or a new battery? Or connecting to the new external western dive?
My MacBook is only 3 and a half years old, is this usual?
Thanks for your advice.

Any update on this? It's driving me nuts.

Hi there I have spoken to apple customer services, they will speak to the retail place that'upgraded my MacBook tomorrow when the manager is in. I'm not very hopeful that there will be any positive outcome though as apple say if the shop say it's not their fault, they can't do anything! I phoned apple last Friday, they said they would get back to me after speaking to the manager at shop. They hadn't got back to me so I phoned th
apple today to find out what was happening. Nothing had been done appareny! So fed up and angry now!

I believe I had this problem and solved it by reinstalling iWork over the existing install. You can read about my fun at http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=11074493#11074493

Ok thank you I'll read your link!

I'm thinking about putting disc 2 on that my MacBook came with ( install discs) but last time I tried it got stuck in the drive, do you know what to do if it gets stuck? How would I get it out? Last time it came out after 20 mins.

Hi there,

I had the same problem some time ago and after some time I was able to find a solution for the random freezes. It drove me absolutely crazy so I hope it can help some of you guys.

My exact problem: Random freezes while using safari for 10-30 seconds => beachball appeared. Some (very few!!!) times those freezes also happened while not using Safari.

First of all: *This problem has nothing to do with a probably broken hard drive! It also has nothing to do with safari itself or any plugins installed.*

Yes, this is correct. The problem is an incompatibility of "SPOTLIGHT" and "BOOTCAMP". So guys, if you have an NTSC Bootcamp (Windows) partition on your Mac, this could be your chance. The only possible explanation (for me) why it often happens while using Safari is, that Spotlight uses this less CPU/HardDrive intensive program to index in the background.

What I did: Go to "System Settings -> Spotlight -> Privacy" and add your entire Bootcamp partition to this list. After you did this, there seems to be a problem that Bootcamp disappears from that list after the Mac reboots. To avoid this, you have Spotlight to create a new index. This is what you have to do; Open your "Terminal" and execute the following command "sudo mdutil -E /" (without "").

After you did this your Spotlight Icon in the top right corner of your screen should start working and a new index is being created. After some minutes of reindexing everything should work smooth again.

*Short steps:*
*1) Insert "Bootcamp" to your privacy list in Spotlight*
*2) Create new Spotlight Index using your Terminal and "sudo mdutil -E /"*
*3) Enjoy working at your Mac again!*

Hope it helps!

Greetings from Germany,
Flo

Hi. I was experiencing two to ten minute freezes without running any applications.

I do not run BootCamp.

Neil.

I think your 2-10 minute-freeze is another - more serious - problem. Due to our random 10-20 second freezes this is another (worse) dimension...

I agree. I'm just checking in to provide data points. This was one of the most frustrating and obstructive problem I have ever experienced in 30 years of computer ownership.

To quickly summarise what fixed my problem (which may or may not be related to this one), I over-installed iWork again from my original disk.

All I can tell is I had the problem for about four months. Just performing a fresh install in a new hard drive helped. It is almost a month since I been having my Mac up and running. I am that happy with the results that I keep coming back to tell the good news. You do not have anything to loose.

If you care about the HD price, then you might be spending time (and money) chasing the wind and reading all the posts and get crazy. (I did it myself LOL)

All the best!

Diego

Just to add another datapoint, I've been experiencing this as well. Steps:

1) Clean install Leopard 10.5.0.
[no problem]

2) Migrate a user (+ apps and /contents) from a Tiger backup drive.
[hangs start, mainly in Camino but sometimes Finder; switching to Safari doesn't help]

3) Upgrade to Snow Leopard from DVD, then to 10.6.2 via software update.
[no change]

3) Hangs happen on another account, but not when booted in Safe mode. I try manually disabling just about everything in the way of kexts, launch agents/daemons, etc. that I can find, to no avail.

4) I have NO bootcamp, DO have Parallels (but complete disablement did not stop the hangs), tried iWork and iTunes reinstalls to no avail.

I don't want to disable journaling, that's a good safety feature, but I'm just about getting desperate enough to try it. I also have doubts that a clean reinstall would help, unless I would NOT migrate my old user account, which would be highly painful to say the least.

Frustrating: there seems to be some sort of firmware update out there which purports to fix a very similar issue for 500GB/7200 RPM machines. Unfortunately it won't install on my MacbookPro 3,1 w/250GB drive.

For now will keep trying whatever less drastic measures I hear about.