Q: MacBook Pro 2011 17" hard freeze

Hi All,

after 3 round trip between my home and my local apple store... they did it! They have changed my mother board and since that, my mac book pro is working like a charme... for the moment...

regards

Hi All,

After more than 8 visits to to Apple care, and 2 mother board changes and twice HDD check and formatting, my Mac book pro seems to wrk fine, i hope it runs well longer.

regards

I have a MacBook Pro 13 inch core i7 laptop with an upgraded 8 gig of ram.  This is the early March 2011 model. My laptop started freezing recently. I dont remember having this issue under OSX SnowLeopard  and I updated to LION the day it came out, so its abeen a long while. Thats why im not sure if the freezing issue has anything to do with LION. I usually leave my laptop on at night when I go to bed and have an external monitor connected to it. Now it feezers once every 3 days or so. Usually i have a browser open and im watching a live video stream and a few other not heavy load apps open and I walk away from the laptop and come back few hours later and the whole system is frozen. The cursor moves and the video is a bit choppy but the sound seems fine. I have the dock set to hide so when I go on it at the time of a freeze it used to be very laggy bringing the dock up and travelling through the dock from one app to another but within the last few days that travelling on the docks lag has gone away the bringing it up part is still very laggy though. A little while ago apple did a safari update and the update details said something about fixing the bug of safari that causes the system to freeze. I thought that would help the freezing go away but apparently it didnt for me. I dont even use safari anymore and im still experiencing the freezes !!! what gives ? anyone has any deffinite solutions ?

After months of getting my early 2011 mbp 15' 2.2 ghz fixed apple finally replaced the machine which I recieved today! After getting excited about finally having the machine I paid for 6 months ago and not being able to use because it didn't work, I turned the machine on, hit software update, hit restart, and the macbook froze. I then held down the power button, it turned off, restarted, went black, restarted, tried to install the updates, said it couldn't install all of them, the little white light started flashing, it did one long beep then restarted again,  with the loading bar under the apple sign.

  Cheers apple, I have just lost all confidence in any of these machines.

I've been to the apple store 4 times already, they've replaced the logic board twice and the entire keyboard. Worked fine for a month, now it keeps freezing again out of the blue, most times I'm just browsing the net. I'm really frustrated with this. I've also wiped the HDD clean and did a fresh OS install 4 times!! Same issues all the time, even downloaded the install dvd twice to make sure I didn't get a corrupted copy!

Apple, I believe you must realize by now there is something really faulty with the new 2011 MBPs.

Yea its happening to me also!  I had to go back to my 2008 MBP because im sick of having to Hard Boot my 2011 17" MBP every 5-10 minutes.  It froze up 5 times on me in the last hour.  I was encoding video and trying to upload it to YouTube.  I already had to send back one 2011 MBP for overheating issues and now its too late to send this one back!  I hope Apple gets it togther and issues recalls on these models... I spent way too much money for a computer crashing on me like this.  Its already affected my business and losing time and money.  Hoping this is not going to be an ongoing issue for Apples future, Ive been with Apple for many years and invested a small fortune for this BS to happen!?

I was having a similar problem with my early 2011 MBP (2.2Ghz, OS 10.6.6).

I bought my MBP specifically for music production and live performance of music. So i've only got a handful of applications installed (Ableton Live being the main one).

I'm in Melbourne, Australia. It's currently summer and the last few days have been pretty warm in my un-airconditioned house (35ºC+). It's also in the last two days that I've experienced half a dozen or so hard-freezes (audio continues, cursor can be moved, but everything else is frozen - requires a hard-reset - just like the many others have written about here).

anyway, following advice on this wiki (itself a response to this thread) - http://mbp-freeze.wikispaces.com/ - I installed gfxCardStatus.

The wiki recommends switching to 'Integrated Only' as a fix, but I use my MBP with an external display most of the time (and the integrated card doesn't support a second monitor).

So I've got mine set to 'Discrete Only' and this seems to be working.

I'm currently running an pretty heavy Ableton project (audio and video) as well as CS5's Illustrator and Photoshop plus all 8 logical cores are maxed-out (following the terminal command on the wiki page).

And it's not crashing : )

(previoulsy it crashed this morning, before the house had even had a chance to warm up fully).

So in a nutshell, having gfxCardStatus set to 'Discrete Only' seems to have fixed my problem.

admittedly the fans are running fast and the computer is hot to touch. but that's kind of expected (even my older 2009 dual-core Macbook gets pretty hot & noisy in this weather).

so long as my system isn't crashing, I can live with the noise and the heat. but it has to be reliable and be able to handle hot outside temperatures (ie a sweaty nightclub or bar, or an outdoor festival in summer).

I'll write again if the problem returns (we'll probably have a few more stinking hot days this summer - that'll be the real test).

(i wrote that previous post a few hours back, but posted it in the wrong thread).

update:

so my Macbook Pro frooze up again. Audio continued. Cursor moveable. same old story.

so i rebooted and  then tried unplugging the extneral display. didn't crash.

however,  I'd really like to use the external display also. So I've now tried updating the OS to 10.6.8.

hopefully that does the job (will keep you posted)

ran it most of today using the external monitor &  'descrete only' mode in gfxCardStatus, but under OS x 10.6.8 this time.

No crashes : )

however today was a much cooler day than the last two... will have to see how it goes on another really hot & muggy day (probably next week sometime)

HI Apple. My new mac (well it's a 2011 macbook pro) which i've owned for one week has just frozen in the way described above by many of these users. Booo. I guess I'll just itemise the minutes that I can't use the machine and we can tally them as extensions on the warrranty.

See my post anyone else having problems with macbook pro late 2011

I'm also very annoyed that the new models don't come with recovery disks!

Hi everyone here is one that might throw this up in the air. My other half purchased a MBP 13' end of 2009.

The machine has been used in what can only be described as 'lightly' and was cased and carefully looked after.

Long story short, went to use it on New Years Eve and would not boot up. When powered up, fans were running albeit I thought a little fast then nothing. A progress bar appeared but did not move and the apple sign as per boot up with spinning disk and nothing. On checking using the Hardware test, the drive itself appeared to be having a problem with some files and the error message 'Keys out of order'. Several attempts to use disk first aid failed and decided not to play with £1000 worth of kit. Apple store in Glasgow identified the problem. The outcome £150 lighter and required new hard drive because it just froze.. according to the staff. This MBP less that 2.5 years out of warranty and a story regarding the applecare which if I had been told covered the hard drive we would have taken it. I am still trying to establish how many units apple have sold with this issue and why is it so difficult for them to accept this is not user error or just bad luck but possibly poor build or components.The Genius guy said this was a common problem yet the store manager was less than forthcoming as its a question of liability. It is unfortunate that some people cannot comprehend a one year warranty with extension could be sold as an extended warranty at beggining as it equates to the same thing.

If anyone has had similar experience or has any info on this or related issues would most definately like to hear them.

I have the same problem. I told them I've formatted my Macbook pro 2011 and I installed Lion. No software is installed.

They tell me in a threatening manner that if I repair my macbook pro, can charge the repair if the problem is software (Apple Spain)

The person who has attended me was arrogant.

Now if they want to charge me to check my macbook. Purchased Apple store two months ago.

Apple Spain deceived and cheated?

According to Apple's Jorge Spain this thread is not official Apple

The problem is that the macbook pro 2011 15' freezes.

Sorry for my english

Regards,

For what it's worth, I was just about to pull the trigger on ordering a new MBP when I heard about the freezing problems.

I have a work MBP early 2011, pre Thunderbolt running Snow Leopard and just recently after an update, I started experiencing the freezing that most describe here.  This update I feel also affects my late 2010 27" iMac running Snow Leopard.  Both are top spec machines.  I Had a random hard self shut down twice on the iMac about a month ago, but not since.

I get freezing pretty bad on Safari at times, RDP and other low intensity applications.  I normally do not run an App I'm not working on in the background.  Since my macs did not have any problems prior to the last two updates, I suspect something is wrong there. 

if you go under energy savings and change off automatic graphics switching itll fix it