Q: MacBook Pro (2010) Freeze

Ok, I promised to report back.

I now had my next freeze. As promised, I tried my trick:

1. Configured an Exposé corner to send display to sleep (the Apple hot key combination doesn't work for me with the external monitor).

2. Had my freeze ... display is blackening out and then a lot of garbage pixels, system looks frozen. What we talk about here...

3. Then, I navigated my mouse blindly into the corner (the mouse pointer won't move). That's easy because the corner is just pushing that far in two directions (bluetooth mouse). The display goes to sleep (sleep, not screen saver!).

4. Another mouse move to wake the display up and voila: thy system is back to normal!


I hope this little trick will work for others too. For me, it turns a system crash into something I can cope with for a limited period of time.


Good luck,
Falk

One more note:

My internal monitor was off (closed clamshell mode).

For my trick to work, it may be necessary that all connected monitors go to sleep. As I would assume that this then causes an internal reset of the graphics board (after it was allowed to go to sleep as well) which may be able to recover from the GPU crash.

After about a week my laptop is still up and running. Every day I connect my Time Machine drive and manually restore files/folders. Yesterday I restored my iTunes library and iPhone backups. So far so good. I know people have wiped their computers and used the migration tool to restore, or did a complete restore from Time Machine, but has anyone tried just literally starting fresh like I did? I'm thinking it was a program I had installed...or the order in which I installed some programs.

I have logged all my freezes over the last weeks. I switched to an nVIDEA only mode by gfxCardStatus which doesn't helped. I disabled hard disk sleep which doesn't helped.

So I found out that I am getting freezes every other day and it happens always after killing my Firefox by a force quit.

This becomes necessary after Firefox executes some Java applets and can not be closed in any other way.

There is never any useful information in the log before the reboot messages are shown.

Is there really no feed-back from Apple. I had already my problems with my Late 2008 model which was repaired that often that they gave me this i7. After half a year the disaster continues ....

I feel like my crashing/freezing issue was also tied (in some way) to Firefox. From what I could gather from talking to a tech at Apple, they can't escalate this to a higher level because there doesn't seem to be a consistent way to recreate the problem. If they could "click this, go there, type that..." and have it freeze every time, then they could escalate it and work on a wide-spread solution/fix for it.

***** for all of us who are seemingly S.O.L. and I even told them about this thread, though I doubt any of them came looking here. Maybe everyone needs to write an email, or make a phone call to Apple referencing this thread. Pretty unbelievable that a company like Apple, who used to be very much about customer service, won't even look at their own discussion forum thread.

Message was edited by: jtweezy

I told to Apple about this thread before sell my "freezind" MBP 2010 and they said....
"That forum is public,anyone can write....."

AMAZING ANSWER !

And in 6 months Apple will launch new Macbook Pros,so this will be forgotten soon....
Great FIX!

@Kopy yeah, that *****.....specially if you also payed for AppleCare (as I did).
As for the answer you received by them, I can only tell you that here in Italy, they don't even follow the standard 24-months law warranty......and that says A LOT.
Personally i had FAR BETTER support with Sony & ASUS, and I think i will sell this junk and go back with their products. Now that the Vista "nightmare" is over, there's no reason to look at Apple anymore (at least for me!). I'm too very disappointed of how Apple has changed in these last 3 years.

I'm disappointed to report that I experienced my first freeze on the 17 day old replacement that Apple gave me. Notes from today's freeze:

- same symptoms as before: spinning color wheel; could move with mouse but could not do anything
- graphics switching was NOT the cause; nVidia graphics were being used
- was running Skype which forces nVidia graphics; confirmed with gfxCardStatus
- freeze happened when opening Flash heavy website using Safari [http://tsn.ca/nhl]
- same site (above) was trigger for at least one of the previous freezes
- waited 20 minutes to see if would become 'un-frozen' - no luck

APPLE: PLEASE REMEDY THIS!!!

--
Marc

This is like buying a $50,000 car that randomly stalls. UNACCEPTABLE!

After yesterday's freeze, I took my MacBook Pro back to the Apple Store. They called me today and reported that the diagnostics found no faults and that I can come pick it up.

I fear that until someone finds a way to consistently reproduce this bug, we're all screwed.

Yes we are...
The problem is we cannot reproduce a random error.

Alu Apfel wrote:
- same symptoms as before: spinning color wheel; could move with mouse but could not do anything

That's not the same symptoms as many in the beginning of this thread (where graphics were completely frozen).

Are you 100% sure your machine wasn't simply running out of memory? (I had a case on my machine where a flash web site grabbed memory incredibly fast, but I was able to force quit Safari before all 8GB were allocated)

APPLE: PLEASE REMEDY THIS!!!

The question is - which "THIS" is your "THIS"? This thread seems to be a collection of very different problems, some related to software, some to hardware.

Espen Vestre wrote:
That's not the same symptoms as many in the beginning of this thread (where graphics were completely frozen).

Are you 100% sure your machine wasn't simply running out of memory? (I had a case on my machine where a flash web site grabbed memory incredibly fast, but I was able to force quit Safari before all 8GB were allocated)

No, I'm not sure that I didn't run out of memory. I am sure that I have pushed the machine more (with respect to memory) and not crashed. I don't think I had enough open to eat up 4GB of memory and even still, it shouldn't freeze.

Espen Vestre wrote:> The question is - which "THIS" is your "THIS"? This thread seems to be a collection of very different problems, some related to software, some to hardware.

Good point. My freeze is when my laptop stops responding and all I can do is move the spinning color wheel around with the mouse. No random pixels. No expose workarounds.

If I had to guess, I would say that it's graphics related (but not video card switching). The way I see it, I've got three options:

1) Live with it and hope that Apple acknowledges and fixes it (unlikely, IMHO).
2) Sell the MBP and jump ship altogether. (would rather not)
3) Sell the MBP and live with a slower MacBook Air which does not exhibit this bug.

I've wasted too much time in lost work, traveling to the Apple store and backup/restores. I want a reliable laptop.

TH2011 wrote:

_*6. IMPORTANT: DO NOT INSTALL CURRENT ADOBE ISSUE FLASH PLAYER 10.1*_

_*Instead Install FLASH PLAYER 10.2 beta from:*_

Website: http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html

Direct link to .dmg: http://download.macromedia.com/pub/labs/flashplayer10/flashplayer102_p2_32bit_mac111710.dmg

7. Download and Install firefox web browser from www.getfirefox.com - Do not use safari.

Done.

Above is exactly what i did a week ago and have not had any problems (graphics issues/kernel panics or freezes) since doing so.

I think the root of the original problem lies somewhere in flash player, safari and the graphics card. I also think migration assistant causes its own unrelated problems and should not be used.

I know some of the above is more of a workaround rather than a direct fix, but it does the job. Im sure safari would work ok but firefox is just so much more stable.

Anyway, I hope this all helps, let me know if you want any of the above clarifying.

GOOD LUCK!

Message was edited by: TH2011 for clarity

@TH2011
It's been a month now - can you give us an update on your machine stability? Any freezes?

--
Marc

For those that are experiencing the issue, I recommend that you submit feedback to Apple (outside of your local retailer) if you haven't already done so.

I need a reliable laptop and have wasted enough time on this. I'm going to sell mine by the end of the month if I don't hear of any promising news.

Good luck everyone.

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macbookpro.html

--
Marc

Alu Apfel wrote:
No, I'm not sure that I didn't run out of memory. I am sure that I have pushed the machine more (with respect to memory) and not crashed. I don't think I had enough open to eat up 4GB of memory and even still, it shouldn't freeze.

From what you tell us, it didn't really freeze completely, so it might have run out of memory. I always run Activity Monitor with cpu usage as dock symbol, you may want to run it with memory usage as the dock symbol to see if your machine may be memory-starved when this issue occurs.

Good point. My freeze is when my laptop stops responding and all I can do is move the spinning color wheel around with the mouse. No random pixels. No expose workarounds.

I saw exactly this on my wife's 2006 MBP the other day, and I'm pretty sure it was just memory shortage. But it may of course also be some kind of kernel lock-up, or it may be e.g. the hard disk not waking from sleep.

I've wasted too much time in lost work, traveling to the Apple store and backup/restores. I want a reliable laptop.

Well, I can recommend the MacBook i7 15" 2.66 GHz, my most reliable mac so far after 24 years