Q: MacBook Pro (2010) Freeze

Unless "input devices" includes the hard drive (which I doubt it will), that won't fix a thing.

In fact, if experience serves, Apple wont be updating this for a while.

If this is indeed a sata controller problem, I wonder if replacing the hard drive will fix it, or if a new logic board (which they might as well replace the entire computer) would fix it.

Same thing...

I've just got my MBP 15" i7 2,6 500GB 2 days ago.
First freeze occurred after about 24 hours of use, during listening to iTunes, connecting my iPhone.
The screen froze with some visible short distortion and all input devices where dead (keyboard, trackpad) BUT the music kept playing until the end of track, but not more than that.
And after 10 minutes, the screen dimmed for a half second and it unfroze.
I am very disappointed!!
Hope they will find a solution for it!! ! ! ! ! !

I wonder if this problem occur to most of the new MBP family users. I'm thinking of buying one but now I'm feeling insecure D:

I have a machine that is 12 days old, CTO, which began having the beach ball problem two days ago, requiring hard reset to get out of. Waiting it out did not work. I have a ST9500420ASG hard drive. Other details:

Model Identifier: MacBookPro6,1
Processor Name: Intel Core i7
Processor Speed: 2.66 GHz
Boot ROM Version: MBP61.0057.B09
SMC Version (system): 1.57f17

The beachballs occurred under light load, no thermal issues.

I am taking the machine to my far away [150 miles round trip] Apple store tomorrow to see what they say about it.

Right now Snow Leopard can't even find the hard drive so I can't take Applecare tech support's advice to reformat and reinstall. I am running from a Firewire drive. No problems at all with that after an entire day.

I also keep getting a popup says PerferenceSyncClient quit unexpectedly. No ideas if that is related in any way.

I am experiencing the same problem with my 15" Core i5 2.4 GHz. No spinning beachball, the system just freezes. The cursor still moves, but the UI is completely unresponsive. It has happened while using both Skype and VLC. Sound continues to work. As others have mentioned, the system comes back if I wait 10-15 minutes.

Does Apple have an official stance on this issue? What's the best course of action for those experiencing this problem?

This will not automatically resolve your problems but let me point out two frequent cases where the computer becomes unresponsive. I am a general interest computer geek (and it's been going for too long). So:

[1] Computer becomes unresponsive due to hard drive issues. The system will halt, waiting to hear from the hard drive, but no data is arriving. You're not getting a grey screen because no error has been reported back. The issue with hard drive controllers on OSX is a tricky one, anyone within the osx86 community will tell you. REASONS: chipset issues; incompatibility with kernel extension; bad cable; bad sectors.

and

[2] WindowServer (the graphics environment) becomes unresponsive due to graphics issues. The mouse cursor will move but the system is now out of the user's control. Logging in via SSH works but you cannot shut down WindowServer, and you cannot restart the machine since it will wait for WS to shut down. REASON: graphics adapter faulty, memory corruption, or software issues (osx).

*
notes to 1: It is reasonable to expect that the timeout priority is with the hard drive which might be experiencing anything from thermal recalibration to shifting of data from bad sectors (typically a very slow process). An additional priority may be placed on the filesystem which may decide at some point that it needs data relocated due to lack of free continuous space.

notes to 2: For some reason I have never been able to just terminate that process. If anyone with more knowledge has the details about this, please chime in.

For further consideration, mind that the mouse pointer redrawing is all hardware (99% sure of this). Additionally, *x networking has sufficient priority to give you ability to log in remotely via SSH or telnet (but I'd expect that to require some hard drive activity to call the demon in question).

Some people have reported that disabling graphics switching (it is possible!) has fixed their problem. And having written all this, my bet is a combination of the above. If i'm not getting this wrong, graphics switching is about negotiating an alternative screen buffer with the built-in chipset. On the i5 MBP the intel chipset handles both graphics and disk. So not a hard drive issue, but an issue where switching from one graphics chip to the other interferes with the hard drive (quite possibly the controller spits out something the drive wouldn't understand and erroneously would try to handle). This can be resolved by replacing the drive with one that has newer firmware. Which in turn may well be the reason everyone is confused about whether it is caused by drive X or Y or something else.

Add salt to your liking.
I'm crossposting this into the other freeze topic.

Thanks for that post, good info. From what I've been able to gather from my system, at least, in my case, everything points to a hardware issue with the NVIDIA GPU. I would consider a driver issue if it weren't happening under Windows (bootcamp) as well. I have ruled out graphics switching. I have ruled out the Intel GPU.

It's very likely that there was a bad batch of logic boards and/or NVIDIA chips. So I am hopeful that a replacement machine will take care of this. The only other thing that has crossed my mind is that the battery technology is unable to power the system when the NVIDIA GPU is active. But I assume Apple would have caught that.

Also, I am kind of thinking of opening a separate thread to discuss this. The thread title here does not help. I don't want hard drive discussions to be mixed in as they take the focus away. There are many things that could cause isolated freezes, or even frequent, like a bad drive. But trying to cover all of them on a single thread really complicates things and makes the end goal harder to accomplish, which is, trying to get help from someone, like Apple.

Message was edited by: BigCat400

did your new MBP had the issue again?

i receive an MBP in the next days and i'm really afraid!!!

Ok so I just got my i5 2.4 and right after I created my user account it froze while 'connecting to Apple'! At first I could move the mouse pointer, after about 6 minutes it turned in the a beach ball, then after about 4 more minutes everything was completely frozen..

This happened while on battery power, and it went completely frozen after connecting it to AC power.

Since then, I had to soft freezes:

* machine and shares still visible from the network
* unfroze after about 10 minutes each time
* second time, the mouse pointer was still moving

-Erik

So far it seems to be running good on AC power. I have disabled automatic gfx switching.

I'm also seeing this. In OS X 10.6.3 and Windows XP SP3 in Boot Camp. It's the freeze of screen and input. Only mine never unfreezes and I lose work. Which makes me very irritated.

Today I had a presentation and it did this multiple times in Windows. On one crash on XP it was weird...One crash actually Windows didn't fully crash-- a dialogue came up saying the NVIDIA driver failed at something, and the screen went to a low resolution and small number of colors (4-bit). I was able to save work but upon selecting restart it Blue Screened. All others are the typical freeze of input and screen.

I am expecting 10.6.4 or some other update to fix this. Soon. I'm also having this particular unit replaced in case it is hardware. This is completely unacceptable considering how widespread it is. What happened to QA/QC on these. Whether it's NVIDIA drivers or not, Apple should have tested these units before sending them out the door. This happens even when doing barely anything so they should have noticed it.

Mine freezing completely, as well.

Have only experienced it on Windows 7 (boot camp).

Had a brief message: "Display Driver stopped responding .... Kernel 196.21 ..."


Yesterday, I update my NVIDIA GT330M driver to latest version 8.17.11.9716 ... have had no locks, so far.

Same freezing issue's here.
Started happening 2 days after purchase.

Sometimes it even refuses to startup again after it has frozen.. after giving it time to cool down it started working again for some hours.... then freeze again..


When running the apple hardware test is froze 2 times out of 10.

MBP 15" 2,53GHz 500GB hdd 4GB Ram

Now i'm going to think not twice but 10 times about buying the ipad or anything else from apple.
I do not mind paying much money for good quality hardware... but paying for stuff that is broken out of the box is not something i enjoy.

The apple 'techie' at the apple store even witnessed a freeze while investigating...
Then they told me that if their apple hardware diagnostic software does not show any errors they will not replace or repair it..

me = getting a bit 'angry' over here. And verry verry sad

Is this freeze issue really related to 2010 models? I've an old macbook and it started having freezes after upgrading to 10.6.3. 2010 models and 10.6.3 came almost at the same time and it may not be a coincidence.

One of the issues that is going to be fixed in 10.6.4 is "Resolve an issue that causes the keyboard or trackpad to become unresponsive". I'll just wait before buying the new macbook pro.