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

Have been having the freeze-up problem since upgrading to 10.6.3. Didn't see it at 10.6.2. I followed what one thread proposed to be a solution, and haven't had a freeze up in 24 hours. This is pretty good considering it could happen minutes apart at times. Sometimes there was no recovery other than a forced power-down, repair disk, and reboot. The portion of the thread that I found helpful were dealing with the flash plug-in. I took the following two files from /Library/Internet Plug-Ins and moved them to a temporary folder....

Flash Player.plugin
flashplayer.xpt

I then restarted. I left them removed for awhile and then moved them back to their original location. No freezes since. I know it sounds wacky, but for now, it seems to have worked.

Harry

Well, I don´t have those Flash-plug-ins, so there must be other causes ...

There definitely is multiple causes. Old plugins have been the cause for some, corrupted prefs and/or PRAM settings for others, and for me booting off of my external HD worked when the internal would always get the freezing. I think its clear that there are more than one thing exhibiting the same symptoms.

Yes, there is a multitude of different causes. I wonder, why, mine only manifested itself in 10.6.3. Why, something so 'off the wall' as moving a couple of plug-ins would solve the problem? There's got to be an underlying reason for it.

I had just the same issues with Flash on my unibody ali Macbook which appeared the day after the uPas release and Steves rant at Adobe. Strange thing was my iMac with almost the same arrangement had no such issues. However after adding and removing Flash things got better for a while... nd finally I reinstall of my SL upgrade fixed it.. That was a month ago... I guess it was down to a screwed PList or something like that in the Library...

I've been watching this forum for a long long time now and myself suffered from the problems described. I think there are probably three things that have closely related symptoms:

- Duff plugins (soln. Delete the plugins)
- Random weird PRAM corruption (soln. reset PRAM)
- The actual slowdown (solution unknown)

My intuition and experiences all point to there being a hardware incompatibility with some hard drives / interfaces in Macs - EVEN FROM BRAND NEW - which is causing the intermittent hanging for many people. What isn't clear to me is whether this has been reported to Apple and whether they've acknowledged it is a problem? They surely can't be happy shipping new products which exhibit this out of the box?

I agree that those are probably the most likely causes. I would add corrupted prefs and caches and fonts as also problems.

I've been booting off of my external hard drive and for a few days have not had any problems. Apple is going to replace my machine so when I get the new one I will report whether the problem is gone or not.

Had this twice on my brand new 2.4ghz 13" MBP. This is atrocious really, I can't do anything at all just total lockup!

For what its worth I've been "spin free" for three days now by booting of my external hard drive. The other thing is that when I installed OS X 10.6 on the external HD, I did NOT install the batch of updates that come up after the fresh install. I just left it on 10.6. So far its been awesome. So its either the fact that I am booting externally and there was some software/hardware problem with the internal HD causing the random spinning beach balls of death, or it was installed the second set of updates. For the record here are the ones that I did NOT install if anyone want to duplicate:

iPhone Compatability Update 1.0
MacBook Pro Software Update 1.3
Safari 4.0.5
iTunes 9.1.1
Security Update 2010-003 1.0

Hope this helps.

Well it looks like others are having the same hard drive related problems with their brand new machines. I just found this article that mentions the problems:

MacBook Pro (April 2010): Frequent Stalls/Hangs Caused by Hard Drive Issue

Several users of newly released MacBook Pro (April 2010) models reported frequent stalls/hangs, accompanied by the spinning beach ball progress indicator, under varying conditions. The problem appears to be hard drive-related, and occurs most frequently with the standard 320 GB 5400 RPM drive, but is also occurring with the 5400 500GB and 7200 500GB drives.

When this problem occurs, the hard drive becomes unresponsive for up to 30 seconds. During the stall, all applications will stall and or cease to properly function, but the mouse cursor can still be moved. CPU usage does not spike.

Several users have reported that the issue occurs frequently when playing World of Warcraft. It can also occur when transferring a large amount of data to/from the internal hard disk or after waking the laptop from sleep.

Traditional fixes, including re-installation of Mac OS X, resetting PRAM, turning hard drive sleep off, and diagnostics via the Apple Hardware Test and/or disk checking tools such as TechTool Deluxe have proven unsuccessful.

If you are experiencing a similar issue, please let us know at info@appletoolbox.com.

Link is here:

http://appletoolbox.com/2010/04/macbook-pro-april-2010-frequent-stallshangs-caus ed-by-hard-drive-issue/

I have a late 2008 Macbook Pro and I have been experiencing this problem and it was making me become crazy, with several (>10) freezings during the day. And yes, it started when I updated to 10.6.3.

I have tried many things: uninstalling drivers, re-applying 10.6.3 update combo, etc. Nothing helped. This morning I read another post saying that people experiencing the problem should not re-install the system (which I was about to do, by the way) because it is a hardware problem. They said that the problem was connected with batteries pressing the cables that can be seen below the battery when you remove it. I checked but I did not find anything strange in my battery (in the post it was suggested to look for bumps in batteries). However I was that one of the cables you can see could be move 1 milimeter up or down. I added a small transparent office tape and fixed the cable down. Later I plugged the battery making sure that it was not making additional pressure and was in the right place. After that I have not had any freeze and the laptop is running now >6 hours.

I do not know what has this to do with 10.6.3, but in my case it is working. Hope it helps for you.

I realize that maybe this is not the thread about my problem. My computer was not completely freeze, only the trackpad/keyboard. I think there other threads that better fit the problem I had.

I might be able to shed a little bit of light on this.

Recently, I bought a Samsung HD103SJ 1TB hard-drive which I use for my system on a Mac Pro Early 2008. Since then this problem seems to be occurring. Right now I'm copying my system over to another drive.

I've never had a problem with Samsung drives before, but it may be an issue with this particular model and it's hard to tell if the problem is Apple's end or the HD manufacturer's end.

I'll run my system off the other drive after the clone and I'll let people know the result.

Just wanted to let everyone know that I have now gone almost a week with no problems simply by booting my 2010 MacBook Pro from external hard drive instead of the internal. So as far as my particular issue is concerned I am confident that it is related to the internal hard drive. Whether its an actual HD issue, firmware issue, driver, or OS problem talking to the internal drive I have no idea. Apple is sending me a replacement machine so once I get it I will report back here whether the new machine is defect free or not. BTW - I am running on 10.6.3 with all patches applied and no spinning beach balls.