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Level 1

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Snow Leopard freezes constantly

Hi
Lot's of people seem to have similar problems with Snow Leopard. I'm feeling a fool for upgrading to Snow Leopard so quickly, but Leopard worked from first installation with no problems and the Mac had been so stable for so long I just thought maybe they'd cracked it!

I'm hoping someone might have a suggestion to solve a pretty painful problem with the Mac. I installed Snow Leopard, but it has started freezing as soon as the Mac screensaver / disk sleep / display sleep happens.

In line with other suggestions I've updated the printer driver (that did solve one problem) and I've checked the permissions and run the repair programme (one permission was repaired). I've also installed the 10.6.1 software update. Notwithstanding this it still freezes and the report says that it is a kernel panic.

These are problems I've never had before with the Mac running Leopard. It never froze, never crashed. To be honest, I've never had an error report before (maybe I've been very lucky?) All of the problems seem directly related to the installation of Snow Leopard.

I am contemplating reinstalling Snow Leopard, but will that make a difference?

It'd be great if anyone has any suggestions.

Thanks

Matthew

iMac 2.4Ghz / 2GB 667 MHz DDR SDRAM, Mac OS X (10.5.6)

Posted on Sep 12, 2009 4:10 AM

68 replies

Nov 7, 2009 4:49 AM in response to Dogcow-Moof

In a way, I wish that was so. But Apple's Hardware Test (extended) and Disk Warrior says otherwise. I believe my panics is related to iTunes. The previous crashes stopped when I upgraded iTunes - no crashes for over a month. Then I upgraded iTunes again to 9.0.2 via Software update and behold - crashes are back.

Perhaps downgrading iTunes might bring stability back to my system.

-Charles

Al D.

Level 1

0 points

Nov 7, 2009 5:14 AM in response to Fivehatters

I am reporting trouble with freezing operations on my new snow leopard upgrade.

iTCB13

Level 1

15 points

Nov 7, 2009 5:28 AM in response to Fivehatters

Yes... I've similar problems...

Seems like Snow Leopard is not so good at ram management and speed like it should...

I've here an macbook with 2 GB of ram... and the problem seems like snow leopard is using all the ram and my processes are running under swap!

For example now I've Mail, Safari (10 tabs) and Text Editor opened and the system is using my all RAM and more 2 GB of swap... my question is ***?!!

When I use Leopard things like this don't happen... and seems like snow leopard "eats" all my system resources... it's always slow and crasing...

I will give another example... for everyday work I use Autocad under a parallels virtual machine with xp... When I use Leopard to do it, I can just have Autocad running and itunes and mail and safari with a lot's of crap opened... but now under snow... to use the virtual machine with Autocad without slow motion... I need to close everything!!

Dogcow-Moof

Level 8

36,233 points

Nov 7, 2009 9:43 AM in response to Charles Leslie

Charles Leslie wrote:
In a way, I wish that was so. But Apple's Hardware Test (extended) and Disk Warrior says otherwise.

Apple's Hardware Test is not conclusive; the Genius Bar at your local Apple Store has access to much more thorough diagnostics.

If changing iTunes makes a difference it's likely because the various versions are accessing memory or your hardware in a slightly different manner.

Think of it as a pothole in an alternate route to a destination. If you take the freeway every day, no problem, but if you take surface streets one day, bam, you hit the pothole.

Nov 8, 2009 2:41 AM in response to Dogcow-Moof

Thanks for the explanation. I also swapped the memory dimms, use one dimm in between crashes switching slots and doing the same for another dimm. Like clockwork, the system always crashed in an idle state (no users on the system). I'll run Tech Tool Pro on the hardware once more - just to cover all angles.

If all comes back fine, I'll dig deeper into the software side to "hopefully" identify what's causing this.

Thanks again for your insight
Charles

Nov 9, 2009 6:24 AM in response to Charles Leslie

problem solved. It was the network Time Machine volume. The sparsefile for this system was corrupted. Using Disk Warrior to rebuild the sparse image solved the mysterious panics.

iTCB13

Level 1

15 points

Nov 9, 2009 6:33 AM in response to Fivehatters

But my Snow Leopard still eating all my RAM and making some really hudge swap file...

So ***?!

Level 1

141 points

Nov 12, 2009 1:42 PM in response to Fivehatters

I also have been having this issue with my macpro but instead i get

Random spinning beach balls of doom then the os systematically falls apart where one item after the other is non-responsive.

plus

when the computer goes into screen saver mode and i try to log into the computer with my username/password the system gets stuck on the "checking password" and have to do a hard reset every time.

• did a restore
• did a new install
• pram reset seems to help it for awhile but eventually the issue returns
• permissions repair
• not running firefox
• limited to a few apps (mail, safari, ichat, itunes, office but quit it after i use it, launchbar, adium, bbedit, activity monitor, dashboard)
• issues are so random that it's almost impossible to isolate
• no crash logs generated either

scary thing is that Windows 7 and boot camp on my mac is working less problematically than snow leopard...

Snow Leopard freezes constantly