MBP Pro 13" freezes with fan spinning & hot when left idle requiring hard reboot

I'm not familiar with much Mac software, but generally I try not to install any drivers or software for my devices since most times these vendors really don't know what they are doing when it comes to software especially when it comes to macOS support. Personally I wouldn't have much faith in the LG Monitor software, or the Samsung driver & software for your external drive, but that is just my opinion. You don't need any special driver or software to use an external drive unless you are trying to take advantage of the drive's hardware encryption.

• Avast --- not needed on a Mac and this app can definitely cause issues and will affect performance
• Samsung driver for the external drives (typically not needed)
• LG Screen Manager ---- is it worth it or can you use the controls on the monitor itself?
• DimmerAgent app -- not familiar with it

I have no idea what the following are:

• Qmaster
• RDUSB0074
• Perian preference pane
• MRTConfigData

Or the several USB drivers:

• usbserial.kext (Jiangsu Qinheng Co. Ltd)
• LfConnectDriver.kext
• ProlificUSBSerial.kext

I'm not familiar with the Turbo Boost Switcher app, but is it really necessary?

The more third party drivers you have installed the more likely you will have a problem. It is one thing if they are really necessary for the hardware you bought, but many times the included drivers are not really necessary such as for an external drive or a monitor.

Your internal SSD is also almost full with only 70GB free and your external drives also only have a little over 100GB free. When working with videos I'm sure you are using a lot of limited free space on these drives just for the temp & cache files. The less free space an SSD has, the slower it will run especially when writing files. The SSD will be playing catch up on internal hardware level maintenance even after you have finished your work since the SSD's internal Garbage Collection routines & other maintenance needs to be performed.

I don't use Time Machine so I'm not sure exactly how it works, but you have 17 local snapshots. Have you allowed a backup to an external drive? Has it completed successfully? I don't think you should have this many snapshots on the drive since they are consuming space in a manner of speaking, but even worse it may also slow down your system a bit since macOS needs to keep track of the file changes between the snapshots. I'm assuming the backups haven't been transferred to an external drive yet by Time Machine.

There is also a possibility one of your external drives or some other external device could be causing a problem. Are you using a USB hub? I've seen a lot of USB hubs fail and cause odd issues. I would suggest using a well respected brand for your USB3 hub and make sure it is a powered hub which supports UASP since you are using multiple external drives.

To see if the last unexpected reboot was caused by a Kernel Panic, use the Console app located in the /Applications/Utilities folder, click on the "Diagnostic Reports" in the left pane of the Console and look for logs in the second column beginning with "kernel" and post them here using the "Additional Text" icon which looks like a piece of paper. Of course there may not be any of kernel panic logs there. Each one should have the date & time in the name so you can post any recent entries in full.

AppleIIme wrote:

• Some of that is very useful thank you. Others are off-topic as I have no issues with speed, only the black screen crash mentioned.

Any speed related references was just in addition to the issue I noted. Since you work with videos I thought you might want to be aware of the those additional side effects.

I do need a number of the items you mentioned and won't go into why, but the following I do not recognize.

That is fine. I'm not really familiar with them except for the AV software, so I don't know if the the others cause any problems or not, but you should consider the possibility they could be causing or contributing to your crashes. I should have mentioned in my earlier post if AV software is required by your employer or school, then you should by all means abide by their requirements.

As you seem very knowledgeable please advise how best to uninstall the following?

I have no idea what the following are:

• Qmaster

• RDUSB0074

• Perian preference pane

• MRTConfigData

Or the several USB drivers:

• usbserial.kext (Jiangsu Qinheng Co. Ltd)

• LfConnectDriver.kext

• ProlificUSBSerial.kext"

It is best to use the uninstall instructions provided by the developer for whatever software installed these items. It is possible some of these are connected to one of the items you mentioned you needed for unspecified reasons so forcefully removing them is not a good idea.

Since you performed a clean install, you may want to consider doing so again, but this time manually installing the most important apps first to see if the system runs fine. Then install the other apps one at a time to see if the problem recurs so you know which app is causing the problem. You should be able to migrate your User account as long as you don't migrate your apps. Migrating settings is a bit risky when troubleshooting. Make sure to have a system backup each time before installing the software so you can easily revert the changes.

This is the best advice I can provide. Maybe one of the regulars on these forums would have better advice.

For the most part Safe Mode is used for testing since it loads only minimal drivers and disables Startup & Login items. However, while booting into Safe Mode macOS will run some file system checks and will also remove some temp & cache files which can cause problems.

I have been dealing with the same thing! I really hate that Apple haven't mentioned this.

What is the exact model of your laptop? You can get this information by clicking the Apple menu and selecting "About this mac".

Almost sounds like a drive issue. Have you tried unchecking "Put hard drive to sleep when possible" in the Energy Saver Settings?

Try running the Apple Hardware Test or Apple Diagnostics depending on the model.

Run EtreCheck and post the report here using the "Additional Text" icon which looks like a piece of paper.

Try booting into Safe Mode. The screen may flash or flicker due to Safe Mode using a very basic video driver.