Snow Leopard freezes constantly

OK Hurray! Its back, (10.5.8)...so it looks. Process, boot from the Leopard CD, go to disc utilities, reformat the drive, turn off any screen saver settings you may have, install Leopard, before you restore from Time Machine or reinstall apps etc. do all the software updates to 10.5.8. Note for doing a TM restore, when I launched Leopard the 1st time after install I created a "test user" This was because I would be bring back my old user account info from Time Machine. I went back to the last backup before I installed SL. To save time when going through setup assistant I did enter my network user name and password for my wireless network. This made getting the updates simple. I just skipped everything else. However, I did all this on a new external drive just to see if it would work. Now I have to repeat the process on the internal drive. One good thing that came out of this is I've totally revised my drive set up as a result of this problem. I will be changing where I store my Time Machine back up and setting up a Raid partition for a second version of 10.5.8 on anther drive so I have both bases covered, next time I upgrade I'll try a test version first. Hopefully its all over. Though it will be interesting to see what happens when I turn the screen saver back on. I still love Mac..this would have been worse on a PC. Time Machine is great app.

I do not use Time Machine.

I manually backup/restore my files after a clean install of Snow Leopard.

Everything is finally working normally again.

If you must use Time Machine, set it up to only backup your files, not your settings because that could interfere with the upgrade because many things have changed in System Preferences.

Hi I agree a lot of system preferences likely have changed. So fare so good with a Time Machine restore. Frankly, if I'd only had one piece of info Friday this whole issue for me would have been resolved easily. Turn of the screen saver. For some reason as soon as I had to do a long process trying to get back to Leopard after installing SL, restore, install, download, or even zeroing a hard drive, the process would freeze due to the screen saver. Why I have no idea, but based on a number of other posts and the fact that turning it off worked, it seems to be the answer as to what was making it so difficult to return to Leopard. No way do I want to wrestle with a problematic release. I used to wait longer, just things have been going so smooth I forgot and jumped in. If not for that screen saver issue I'd have had 10.5.8 back running Friday night. No thanks to Apple's best live support, only through the comments on this forum did I read enough related to the screen saver that I tried turning it off, it worked. I was able to complete the necessary processes to return to a stable OS. Until SL I’ve never had freezing occur just because a screen saver starts during a download or an install. Anyway solved now. I'm kicking myself for not thinking to turn off the screen saver. Duh.

As fare as manually backing up and reinstalling everything, I was doing that fifteen years ago, remember having to turn off all your extensions and restarting to do any kind of install, and how about manually picking out and trashing the preferences and files that still remained from an poor uninstaller that caused conflicts. Remember having to one by one turn things on and off until you figured out what was the problem. We've come a long way since then and frankly I'd hope we'd be able to rely on an app like Time Machine. I simply don't have the time these days to do all of that. Yes every once and a while its a good idea to rebuild your system. But its not like we are running windows. This was not one of those times I felt like doing that. All I wanted to do is get the heck out SL until its stable and back to what is stable.
Anyway, old school still is the last line of defense. I'm just as grateful as heck Time Machine worked. I can always rebuild my system from scratch when I have time. Or buy my next new system. ☺

I have same problems. I contacted support, performed a permissions verify / repair, checked disk all o.k. Was told to re-install snow leopard if problem arose again which it did. After re-installing snow leopard I left the mac for a while. It went into sleep mode and you guessed it.... it froze while I was entering my password after sleep mode. I hadn't even started using it. Re-installing does not fix the problem!

Sorry to hear you are having the problem. As fare as the issue continuing after reinstalling SL I wouldn't know. I went back to Leopard 10.5.8. The sleep issue was preventing me from even doing that. Once I turned my screen saver off I was finally able perform the 90min plus process to reinstall my old installation from back up. Now it all works great again. As fare as SL I have a separate drive I intend installing it too. When I can boot from that drive an see no issues I'll consider migrating then. Until then I'm happily zipping along in 10.5.8. But yes a lot of people seem to be having the same problem. I did and I simply don't have time for that. I spoke with Apple yesterday and I was informed that in SL for some third party apps you need to click on the app Ikon, then "get info" and you will see a new option that comes SL to choose from 32 bit or 64 compatibility. If the app hasn't been upgraded to 64 bit it won't work unless you do that. I don't even know how one finds that out. Installing SL is a lot more work than I have time for right now. My business depends on my system working.
I suggest going back to 10.5.8, and work with SL on a sepparate drive as I have chosen to do. That way if yo have problems just restart on the other drive.

Good luck!

It has gotten better - but it is still happening a lot.

Any tips?

Installing now - Hoping!! cause its been getting worse!

Wish you luck!

Dale

The update is only good for Mac's listed in this About the Performance update.

DALE

Test

Just to throw my fuel into the fire I have "random" freezing issues as well, except for me it's very predictable in certain regard. I have had issues when changing preferences, especially related to networking, but that is less than reproducible at this point. However, any time the MB is put to sleep the problem will occur. One of two things will happen at that point: 1) MB will wake to login screen where I can put in my password and then when the login box states that it's "checking my user/pass" I get a beach ball of death. Hard shutdown / restart is required. 2) I will actually be able to login but the system is only usable for ~5-10 seconds. My wireless never connects (there is no animated wifi emblem as to state it's connecting, but just one of the bars is lit which is why I know it's locked) and the toolbar and the dock go out to lunch (i.e. nothing responds). Force quit doesn't respond to anything and the WindowManager throws exceptions (that can be later looked at after restart). I hadn't had any of these issues prior to 10.6.1. The "performance update" (really Apple?) doesn't apply even though my late 2008 MB has a SATA drive.

What can I say, my laptop is currently quite useless as I can't use it during the day as I need it to function. Apple support has been less than helpful and going to see a Genius would just be a waste of time at this point.

I'm just throwing my experience in to the mix because the more thorough examples of what/when/why this is happening the better. I'd gladly send in any debug but there is none when it locks, only sparse errors in the logs - no core dumps (yes it's enabled).

Would be fabulous if Apple pushed out 10.6.2 if this is addressed. Otherwise I might as well go back to 10.5.8 for the foreseeable future.

One other item I failed to mention. After the lockup it's a roll-of-the-dice whether or not it boots to a usable system on the first boot. Second time it always works, but first time the window manager sometimes never comes up and I get to look at a pale blue screen for as long as I'd like (Apple BSOD?). I've checked S.M.A.R.T, the volume (even thought it's a clean install), permissions, ran all daily/weekly/monthly, rebuilt every possible database and cleared all possible cache after I'm up in a running status. I've also disabled anything that starts that's not required. Freeze fail still ensues.

Too good to last.. After a month or so without freezing, I upgraded iTunes via Software Update and the freezes/panics are back (every few hours). I'm thinking of downgrading iTunes if the 10.6.2 update isn't release within a few days.

Regards,
Charles

If you're really seeing kernel panics you likely have a hardware issue with your Mac.