Mac will freeze every few seconds

I had a similar problem on a 2006 Mac Pro running 10.6. It turned out to have been a bad NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT video card. 2 or 3 times per minute the screen would freeze for 5 to 10 seconds, when it came back to life it was clear that the computer had continued to do its work while the screen was frozen. In effect, it was just the video that would freeze. Strangely, I could still move the pointer around the screen during most of the freezes. Occasionally the monitor would become scrambled in a repeating multi-color pattern and sometimes flash at a seizure inducing rate. Anytime that happened, the computer needed to be restarted. Activity Monitor provided no clues and Tech Tool Pro didn’t find a problem either. I happened to have a spare video card so I replaced it and it is back to normal. Sure enough, the two largest capacitors on the card were bulging. It lasted about 8 years so I can’t complain.

I noticed that my mouse has been freezing ever since I plugged in a second external monitor. I am running Yosemite with the latest updates. I did not reboot after I plugged in the second external monitor but I will try a reboot and see if that makes a difference. Does anyone know a good process monitor to see what may be interfering with the mouse controls. If I am not mistaken I believe the mouse is a very basic I/O protocol level.

QA Bob

Nope still getting the freeze.

Ok I have a fix. I disconnected my external monitors and now the mouse is working perfectly. So it seems that there is a conflict with the mouse input and the monitor inputs.

I know with my issue, I turned off the NVIDIA driver and just used OSX Default Graphics Driver and problem was solved

Same issue in 2016, everything worked fine until my mac suddenly freeze.

After restart, it freezing every few second from startup even not log on already.

I think It's a software problem because my bootcamp OS still worked fine and when I boot OS X from external drive (backup), everything worked fine too.

You might want to consider starting a new discussion. Since this one is a couple of years old, less people are likely to look at it. A new post would be much more visible. You can link to this one.

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