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MacBook Pro 2011 17" hard freeze

Overheat? The fans revved and suddenly I could use nothing but the cursor. Had to hold down the power switch to kill all and then re-power & startup. I wasn't doing anything unusual, but I had 7 apps open and was amid an auto-backup to TimeMachine.

Just a little disillusioned and concerned, wondering if anyone else there has experienced a hard freeze like this.

macbook pro 17" 2011, Mac OS X (10.6.6)

Posted on Mar 1, 2011 11:15 AM

Reply
2,292 replies

Mar 21, 2011 5:58 AM in response to Rensoom

I was just alerted to this thread after reading about it on macrumors. I'm a new apple customer. This is my first macbook pro. I'm having this issue as well. Other than this issue, i'm very satisfied. I've noticed 2 types of lockups. One:

Complete lockup requiring a hard restart.

Two:

Everything locks up except the mouse. Can't click on anything. Waiting any amount of time doesn't help. Sometimes waiting will result in a full lockup.


I haven't called apple yet...But i'm considering doing it now. I've yet to read this entire thread because it's huge but i have subscribed to it and plan to read it. I hope this is an issue that can be fixed, but from what i understand this is what it is like to be an early adopter.


I'm using parallels when most of the crashes happen....haven't done anything to try to force the crash so i'm seeing them randomly once every 2-3 days.

Mar 21, 2011 6:00 AM in response to lithast

I've experienced 7 freezeups on my 2011 15inch 2.2ghz in the 13 days I've owned one.

They range from when I shutdown in Win 7 Bootcamp (it hangs on Shutting Down and the Circle stops spinning) to disconnecting the external display. I've also experienced lots of beachballing (if this is relevant to the freeze ups I don't know).

I wasn't able to replicate the Wiki Step 1 Instructions of the freeze first time. I did however manage to do it on my second attempt an hour or so later. Ironically the first time (when it didnt freeze) I was on my bed and the second time (when it did freeze) I was in my Office on a table. The second time the brightness was up to the max and it was plugged into the mains power.

Like someone has said before it does seem to happen if you "catch it out" ie from sleep go straight into something graphic or cpu intensive rather than easing it in gently - which is completely unacceptable for the worlds most powerful laptop range.

The two people I spoke to on the phone from Apple were very understanding and infact didn't even ask me to do any tests whatsoever and infact were more than helpful in offering me a refund/replacement (thankfully I did this within my first 14days of purchase). All in all for my first ever Mac computer I'm disappointed and disheartened with the brand.

I have taken up their offer on a replacement which means I'm going to be without a computer for a week (bto antiglare macbook) as I ditched my PC and got a Macbook as a desktop replacement. From what I've been reading however I'm not sure if this is going to eliminate the issue(s).

All in all I'm still (stupidly) loyal to the brand since my first iPod 6 years ago. I hope they can resolve this issue as I will be asking for a full refund on the replacement if it's exactly the same.

Mar 21, 2011 6:02 AM in response to John Harrold

Report of the machines freezing using the INTEL graphics chip:

"
Using google chrome (extend the window to take up the whole screen), go to their webGL demo at

http://www.chromeexperiments.com/det...arium/?f=webgl

Set the fish count to 1000, wait for 1 min.

Please Note: Your Macbook could freeze completely, so save any opened documents!

On my macbook Pro 2011 2.2Ghz hiRes the issue is reproducible every time after about 30 sec using Intel GPU. I have not tried ATI graphics yet."

From http://forums.macrumors.com/showpost.php?p=12212522&postcount=52

Mar 21, 2011 6:07 AM in response to K43l

Agreed, I came across the article on maclife, I thought i was the only one and that i was just being a *******. Good to know im not as much of a noob as i thought. And word yet on a fix? i think im going to go the apple store today and bug the genius peeps. lol haha "bug" the genius peeps.....there is a bug with the lappy toppy hahaha...wow way toooo tired

Mar 21, 2011 6:12 AM in response to rredge

I am also experiencing this issue. At first I thought it was the application I was running, Eve Online, but it appears to have the exact same symptoms that everyone else is reporting: Black screen, locked up, able to ssh to the machine, cursor responds. I will be calling Apple after work on this issue.

---
Additionally this issue only happens after the system has been running the application for an extended period of time. If I exit the app a few minutes after starting it's closed without issue. After running for 30 mins + the application locks to black screen, cursor responds.

Message was edited by: Bourius

Mar 21, 2011 6:09 AM in response to Rensoom

ive had 7-8 kernel panics in the last few weeks,funny thing is, its not happening in windows,even when i game,i wondered if the default install of osx is gammy?- so you think a call to apple?or back to the store,?i wondered if its the graphics switching,its not going to the discrete gpu when it needs to.now in concerned to take it back,oni few weeks old,seems like lot o probs with new machines,according to this thread.

MacBook Pro 2011 17" hard freeze

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