24" iMac Screen Freezes since 10.6.3 update - pls help!

Excuse the typos. On my iphone at the gym.

Not to mention most of all our machines are already considered vintage or on the verge of going vintage. That doesn't help the hope of a permanent fix from Apple.

forevermacintoe wrote:

freandc wrote:

*IMPORTANT* - Apple is not going to fix this problem. Period. Ever. Period. Stop wondering whether that update is going to help -- IT IS NOT.

I take issue with this point. I paid for a product, and the latest OSs break that product. It's rediculous that I need to jump through hoops to downgrade my video drivers (this is what the Krysztof Turek "fix" does) in order to get my computer to turn on.

How do you know that AMD & Apple will never fix this issue? I think if it gets enough attention, then they should. It doesn't even seem like it should be that difficult if a rollback fixes the problem.

I don't know about AMD, but NVIDIA provides Mac drivers for some of its GPUs. I was able to update my driver to the absolute latest version without any hassle, and it has updated itself automatically twice so far. Hopefully AMD will start doing this too. It's convenient that Apple provides drivers, except when something goes wrong, turning it into a nightmare.

Good choice. Since people on this thread are updating, let me warn you all: Do NOT update to Mavericks. It's buggy and epicly slow and has no new features worth mentioning.

It's only "buggy" if you have a lot of unnecessary software (like commercial antivirus software, specialized hard drive cleaning "garbageware" ) and/or software that has not been updated to its latest versions

After my experience of trawling AMD support/developer forums for OpenCL problems, I now understand that AMD are terrible at driver support for older models! Don’t expect anything from them. In fact, I now believe that AMD are the real problem here. Apple may want the issue fixed, but AMD probably don’t support that model anymore. It all depends on Apple’s agreement with AMD.

What we need to be looking for is a signing solution. If someone can tell me how to sign a kext, I’d be willing to try using my developer account to do it.

I don't install any junk, especially not any antivirus (not needed), and I avoid anything that launches on bootup. Lots of bugs on both my computers. Most importantly, with a fresh installation of Mavericks, my MacBook Pro's loginwindow process crashes randomly about once a week. Also, the Dock keeps switching to the wrong screen when I connect to my Mac with VNC. I was lucky not to have that "wifi causes kernel panic" bug that some on this site were having. Of course, the bugs don't affect everyone, but why take the risk?

Well,

I haven't updated to the latest version of Mavericks, yet, but I have OS X 10.9.2 installed and my 2009 iMac is running fairly spiffy on it.

MIllions of others are not having issues either.

Users who have Mac issues are the only ones that post to help forums like these. The OS issues in these forums only represent as small percentage of users having issues from installing Mavericks.

Your Macs have got to have something that is causing your Mavericks issues.

Instead of complaining and whining about how bad Mavericks is, why don't you start two new threads for each of your Macs and post an Etrecheck report for each.

Etrecheck was developed as a simple Mac diagnostic reporting tool by a regular Apple Support forum user and technical support contributor named Etresoft.

Etrecheck is a small, unobstrusive app that compiles a static snapshot of your entire Mac hardware system and installed software.

This is a free app that has been honestly created to provided help in diagnosing issues with Macs running the new OS X 10.9 Mavericks.

It is not malware and can be safely downloaded and installed onto your Mac.

http://www.etresoft.com/etrecheck

Copy/paste and post its report in a new thread posting so that we have a complete profile of your Mac's hardware and installed software so we can all help with your Mac performance issues.

Thank You.

Here's my report

Thanks so much for this thread and the fixes provided. The step by step fix for Mavericks by freandc on page102 was a life-saver. My early 2008 iMac was annoyingly freezing with solid-color screens so I couldn't do anything. It was actually still running fine, but I couldn't use it as the screen would go white, black, or a weird jumble of colors with no way to get it back working correctly. It's annoying that I have to remove the new drivers every single time I update, but at least it's working.

I'm baffled at why Apple doesn't fix this since it requires no work; it's just a matter of swapping out the faulty new drivers for the old ones which work fine.

Imagine that General Motors redesigns the engine in one its vehicle models and it subsequently discovers that there was a flaw in a component of the old engine. The redesigned engine has a newer version the same component which no longer has the flaw but, unfortunately, that new component won't fit in the old engine. To address the problem for owners of the older model, it must manufacture a new version of an outdated component for a car model it no longer makes or sells. Add to the facts that some owners of the old vehicle have already sold it and you have a situation in which the economics just won't work because no matter how much money GM spends to address the problem, the only thing it will get in return is the goodwill of a finite number of old customers who may or may not repay the favor by buying a new car in the future.

Now adjust the scenario to adjust for the lower cost of an iMac relative to a car, the fact that any new software even if it is for an old machine will have to be tested with each new version of the OS, the very short product cycle for computers (and Apple in particular), that the drivers are third party manufactured and that AMD supports more chipsets and graphics cards than Apple, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera and it is not baffling at all why there is absolutely no chance in **** that this is getting fixed.

Everything said here about Apple's attitude on fixes for 5-7 year old hardware would seem valid, but one thing disturbs many of us. Apple builds what is basically... a closed, locked system of hardware so they can control how operating system updates will function with their hardware. Unlike a PC where we could throw away a video card and add a more powerful modern one, we can't do that. We also can't easily add a bigger HD or add a considerable amount of faster memory.

We all bought apple products bc we liked the concept of a "bulletproof" system and accepted the fact that performance gains via hardware were not possible. We didn't expect that "upgrades" in the OS X operating system would actually degrade the system and make it unreliable. My iMac was a rocket ship when I bought it new in 2007. It was bulletproof and handled all my tasks with ease. My use of this iMac hasn't changed, I'm still using the same old Adobe CS4 suite bc I can't afford updates LOL. I haven't added any new software, but my once bulletproof rocket ship is slower, freezes up once a week, and if wish there was a way to go back to 2007, but I know that won't/can't happen.

I haven't given up on Apple, just bought my wife a new iMac for Christmas, and she loves it, coming from the PC environment. We have iPads, iPhones, and I even have a MacBookPro but I won't install Mavericks on it bc it runs fine as is. Lesson learned... Don't upgrade just bc you think a newer OS X will make life better.

LightningMike,

I think you're exactly right. OS upgrades are just like any new product -- the sales pitch seems great but you've got to read the fine print. Unfortunately, in cases like this, not only don't you see the fine print before you buy but even after the sale you've got to scour message boards to try and find it. If there is one thing that Apple could and should do, it would be to acknowledge the flaw (which, to my knowledge, they have not done) and to provide some kind of compensation, e.g. a credit against a future purchase, which would allow them to put a value on our future business and allow us to know they care :-).

After my G5 PowerMac's logic board died after only a few years, not to mention Apple's transition to Intel only a year after I bought it, I knew I would never buy a top-of-the-line Apple product again. But I did buy a 2008 24" iMac that then developed this problem. I documented it carefully for a year or so, noting every freeze, and after taking it in twice, the Apple store did give me a new graphics card, which has for the most part worked well over the last several OS upgrades without using the kext fix.

But I can suggest, if your machine is working well with the kext fix, putting an SSD in it does wonders. It's a little minor surgery, but not that hard, and for the last two years, this machine has been truly zippy. Got a Samsung 128GB for an excellent price on sale, and offloaded most storage to external discs. I think you'd be quite happy with the performance upgrade. (Use the program Trim Enabler, too, if you do this.)

Also, by the way, a 2.5 inch SSD does not mount, as is, in the iMac. You need a 3.5 inch tray that mounts first. Then, because the connector cable does not reach the extra 1/2 inch needed, I used electrical tape to hold the drive down, but I haven't opened it up since and have no complaints. Quiet as a mouse, too.