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

My freeze has been "solved." It's actually a workaround. My problem was never a software configuration problem.

For me, the easiest way to observe the problem was to do a large copy to a USB drive (with a blinking light indicating data transfer) and start a video. Within minutes, the audio/video would hang.

Well, I bought another drive (Hitachi 500GB, 7200rpm) after recommendations, and it had the same issue. Therefore, I went deeper with the help of apple support.

Apparently a Mid 2009 MBP 15 (2.53 GHz) with BootROM version MBP53.00AC.B03 (check using the system profiler) is incompatible with SATA 3.0 Gbps hard drives. Using the Hitachi "Feature Tool" I backed my drive from 3.0 Gbps to 1.5 Gbps). It seems the Fujitsu (original) drive is capable of 1.5 and 3.0 Gbps, so that was a spec I overlooked (my bad).

I cloned the drive, and it's been flawless since. Of course, it's only been a day or two, but the problem would manifest itself within minutes before. I've copied/deleted a couple of terabytes so far with no issues.

Now I'm just waiting for a bootrom version that supports SATA 3.0Gbps drives.

I hope this helps someone else.

BD0

Gosh, i just went through **** with 10.6.3, had to reinstall back to leopard, i now realize leopard is much better and faster than snow leopard.

I am going to wait before apple can get a hang of things and go back to building mac the old fashioned way, plain and simple and sturdy.

I feel your pain as most of us have been there before, but SL is stable its just the rubbish we install afterwards which makes it fall over.

Hi,

I think that there may be a separate issue with SL 10.6.3. Yep, there is a total lock-up, but it doesn't go away. Also, I'm getting a failure to restart from sleep. (Related?). As I've posted elsewhere, this is happening frequently on my macbook pro and one of my mac minis.

It's not happening on my macbook air or the other mini - both of which are still on 10.6.2. Applying the combo update doesn't help. Neither does safe booting and then restarting. This started soon after the 10.6.3 update was installed on the two machines in question.

But these are, I think, a different issue from the one that started this thread. I'm mentioning it now because we might get a few people looking for a solution to this new problem, and I don't think that they will find one here.

x

Hi there. I think you may be interested in the dissussion on the forum "display anomalies". on this site. And the website. http://macbook-pro-issues.webs.com/
D

Nothing on that site.

There is information there On that site of very similer issues with the MacBook pro. I thought it could be relevent to your MacBook. Problems with the graphics/motherboard arise after installing snow leopard.

I am having similar problems with the BBOD. My problem seems to occur when the computer comes out of sleep mode, especially when Safari and iTunes is left open. When I restart everything seems to runs ok.
If I remember to close all apps before sleep and then come out of it there seem to be less BBOD.

In reading the posts on this forum and others there doesn't seem to be a fix for all.
I haven't called Apple support yet. I'm assuming they don't have a fix or this forum would have mentioned it.
Is there a way to trouble shoot this problem?

Went through most of this thread and think problem may be similar enough to mine for me to chime in. I use SL 10.6.3 and have a problem that occurs after a few hours to a few days of system use, The problem is a slow down that is most pronounced in Address Book and in Word. When I try to type, into a document or a name to search for in address book, the machine is slow to respond (spinning ball in Word or just a long pause in address book). Eventually characters appear, but it clearly is not right. I can find nothing diagnostic in any logs. I have shut down all others apps and looked at activity monitor for memory or cpu hogs. I see nothing. When I restart, everything is fine, until the next time...

Any ideas?

I just took delivery of a brand new MacBook Pro 2.66 Ghz with 8GB of RAM and 7200 rpm hard drive upgrade. Having problems right out of the box. Spinning beach ball periodically for around 30 seconds at a time, usually stops happening after 15 minutes or so after reboot or waking from sleep. I tried a fresh install of the OS, booting into Safe Mode, etc... nothing has helped so far. Even reset PRAM and ran disk repair and permission repair. Very frustrating for a brand new machine.

Also should mention that it happened with just Apple OS installed and none of my own files!

Wow, that's bad - that an out-of-box new device is not working right.

I feel your pain.

I had QA problems with the last Apple notebook I bought, but I live about 4 miles from an Apple store so after taking it back four times got a "good" one, which ultimately ended up exhibiting the mega-beachball problem we're discussing.

I'm not so sure Apple's QA is what it used to be.

Neil.

1) Contact Apple.

3) Send it back, get a replacement....

One pretty crazy development. For the past day I've been booting off of an external hard drive and ... no freezes! Now I've had times before where I thought it was fixed so I'm not declaring this solved yet but so far seems encouraging. The wierd part is that you would think that if it was a physical issue with the internal hard drive that it would always exhibit the problem rather than sporadically. For now I'm going to continue booting off of the external drive since it is actually usable. If it stays perfect after a few more days I will have enough evidence to go with a replacement drive from Apple or new machine.

After upgrading to 10.6.3 "the spinning ball" is very often (every half minute or so) blocking my work. It seems that some background activity is blocking the foreground activity. First I thought a stranger were intruding my machine, placing some "trojans" or something, but my anti-spy-software didn´t find any (puh!). As someone suggested earlier I tried to go back to 10.6.2, but after a couple of hours installing Snow Leopard from the CD I got the message "Installation failed". I reinstalled my system (10.6.3) from Time Machine, and now I really don´t know what to do, except watching the spinning ball from time to time ... This is not what Apple should be like!