MacBook Pro 2011 17" hard freeze

No, but the more people post the more awareness it will bring to the issue.

(Oh, same issue, btw.)

Schwa and Matt which processor 2.2 or 2.3 and hdd do you have. Just curious as to whether the problems are more to do with the 2.3 processor or not, as from what I recall Schwa you dont seem to have replicated any of the freeze issues or maybe I am wrong.

I use BOINC to consistently recreate the issue. It will fail on games too. Same symptom - black screen when coming back from a game or frozen screen when BOINC is cranking the CPU.
17" 2.3 i7 just bought last week.

Took it to Apple and they looped their extended tests for 24 hours with no failure. I brought it home and froze it inside of 15 minutes.

I know that they're working on a firmware/driver patch. ***** to have a new toy and be stuck with my old toy until they figure it out.

Ok, so wanted to update folks.

Nothing has helped. New OSX install, everything Apple has suggested. I'm sure it's firmware, but there are other issues with this box as well (optical drive is a bit wonky) so I'm gonna return it and wait until these issues are resolved.

I'm not returning it over this issue - that would be crazy... but I am returning it.

For everyone saying that this is a firmware issue and nobody else is helping, sadly there is no proof of that. I just finished on the phone with an Apple Senior Advisor for the 2nd day in a row of trying to fix it, and they said these forums are not an accurate source of anything when I said people are saying it is firmware.

Think about it, there are quite a few people who are having issues, but think about how many more aren't having issues. I know of tons of people with the new Pro in the same specs as I am, doing more than I am doing and not freezing up.

After finishing all of the Advisor's tests and trials, he set me up for a new product replacement. Sure, I'm not happy that I'm going to be without my computer again for a long while, and during Spring Break when I was going to buy and play DA2 none the less, but there are computers that aren't working and there are computers that aren't working; it might be a firmware issue, but I didn't ask for a replacement, Apple recommended one to me. And hopefully this will fix up the issues for me at least 🙂

I disagree Adam. I was having all the same issues as the people on here so I'd return my new Macbook and buy the Windows laptop I was looking at (Sager 8150). In looking at their boards, people are having the same problem with these. With a little more research I learned that people are having the same freezes with desktop, laptop, Windows, Linux, OS X with different ram, graphics cards ... everything different except the new Sandy Bridge processor/chipsets. There's clearly something major going on and it doesn't have anything to do with software. I'm not going to blame Apple, but I walked into the Apple store today and returned my laptop. It was a really easy process, they just scanned my receipt and gave me a new receipt to put it back on my card - less than 5 minutes and I was done. Windows 7 Service Pack 1 seems to have helped the issue a lot, but I don't want a computer that's clearly having hardware issues from day 1.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/sager-clevo/555274-random-freezes-8130-8150-a.ht ml
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/304461-31-sandy-bridge-computer-random-freezes

Have any of you saying that it's a defective machine try the same tasks under windows? I have the same freeze/blackscreen issues when exiting steam games and star craft 2; however, when I run bootcamp and player games there, I can easily play 2-3 hours and exit the game just fine. Clearly, there is some driver issue that is not playing nice on SL at the moment. I just don't see how the majority of this can be a physical problem. If the same thing occurred in windows 7, then we'd be in trouble.

I didn't say this was definitely a firmware issue, I said that the behavior folks are reporting is typical of a video driver (most likely) or possibly firmware problem.

Whoever asked...I have a 2.3GHz i7 quad.

I had the same problem. I got my macbook pro 15" 2.0 i7 at Best Buy (Corporate Card) on March 1. After a building up heat with any of Adobe CS5 applications, it would freeze. I believe there is a reason since I spent about 10 hours testing, configuring, and finally realizing the issue

Some restults:

Never froze when I had the factory 4 GB Memory in it
Never froze when I put 1066 8 GB Memory in it
Froze when I put 8G Corsair Memory
Now freezing is not an issue when I put 8GB Kit from Patriot (Fry's) that is labeled specifically for Macbook Pro

I believe this is a firmware issue first and foremost as most memory of the same type should work fine, but I find it strange how Corsair really made it happen often.

WAIT for the update! They are not going to recall the hardware and most likely that is not the issue. Worst case scenario like in 2007 (I believe) the macbooks needed a heatsink mod and everything was good.

Obviously report your issue so the update happens, but until it does you will be disappointed by the results of replacements.

Here is the memory I would stay away from for now:

Corsair CMSO8GX3M2A1333C9

so .. not a real fix, but one way to get around this problem and protect your laptop is to:

while still in fullscreen game (and you have saved, but before you exit back to desktop):
1. ssh into your laptop (you need to ensure remote access is enabled in system prefs)
+ssh <username>@<laptopname>+
2. sudo sync
3. sudo reboot

system reboots nice and clean, no disk corruption .. its all good. [ or good enough till they fix it ]

What was interesting after doing this, system rebooted no problem. Came up quickly and the internal disk was healthy (ran verification). The fans were still running for a bit, though checked temp and all looked ok <60. After a couple minutes fan shutdown.

under - about this mac - more info - serial ATA -
when you click to the right top box on the serial-ATA Device tree for the 2 devices can you see whether its a 3 Gigabit link speed or 6 Gigabit Link speed under each Device ?
for example close the side facing arrows and highlight each of the two items. Below that in the big box at the bottom right - look under Link speed and product and see whether this is a 3 Gigabit or 6. - Let us know, want to establish if there are different sata controllers on which MacBooks. It could be possible that the chips are not communicating properly with HDD/SDD/CD causing the freezes.
Could members not having problems please respond also and make sure you let us know if you are having problems or Not when referencing your report.

Regards
Nicholas.

Nicholas,

I'll check that information when I get home, but I have more information that may be useful. I do a lot of work in the terminal, and after these freezes I can still ssh into the computer, move around, kill processes, etc. My computer froze last night while I was asleep. According to the display it froze around 2.30am. I use fetchmail to download my email from gmail and I still received email that was sent to me around 4.30 am (2 hours after the interface became unresponsive). According to the system logs in Console.app, the system was still logging until shortly before I rebooted the computer around 8am this morning. So even though the interface becomes unresponsive, it's still working in the background including writing to the disk (as the email received and console messages would indicate).

I've still got to reinstall and confirm the freezes tonight before I call Apple.

Thanks John! Please keep us posted!

You know what it is. I bet you it's because of the graphics switching. I only recently realized the graphics auto switching protocols are absolutely hideous. While playing wow, minimizing and going back to full screen sometimes cause the dedicated card to cut out and switch to integrated. While burning a cd, or doing a time machine backup, I can consistently freeze the system into a hard lockup by just going from full screen to windowed. SC2 also seems to have an issue with exiting the game. The system isn't actually locked up, but rather, it's the display that's locked up. You can still hear the music and as some other users have said, the background processes are still going on. It's just an issue with the graphics switching and not being able to correctly execute commands.

Relax guys, it's not something wrong with your computer. According to SMART I've had over 80 hard shutdowns in the last 2 weeks and even then I'm not at all worried as it'll be eventually fixed by apple via software update. Once again, for the vast majority of people in this thread, it's something we'll just have sit tight and wait for an update.

Syan,

With respect to just waiting, that's great if you're like most of the folks here an you're having trouble with WOW or StarCraft. There are those of us who use our computers for work. For example, I'm a mathematical modeler and if my computer is going to lock up every time I put a moderate load on the CPU --- which seems to be all it takes for me --- then asking me to wait a week or two is just ridiculous. This machine costs almost $3k, and I don't mind spending that kind of money on something if it does what it's supposed to. Heck, I wouldn't mind if it was some sort of odd video flickering, but this is going to impact my ability to get anything done, and that is simply unacceptable.

Do you really think I should just relax about this? What if I told you to not work for a couple weeks, would you relax?