Q: MacBook Pro 2011 17" hard freeze

Hey Schwa,

We're collecting information on this wiki page to summarize this problem. We were discussing this last night, so I thought I'd point it out to you. If you want to add anything, you're more than welcome:

http://mbp-freeze.wikispaces.com/

Just ran the SmallluxGPU at CPU*8+GPU and system froze within 5 secs.

I have had the exact same freeze. I am crashing with only FCP open, my scratch disk is external via firewire 800.

crazy thing is that even my 2009 Quad Core "Nehalem" 2.9Ghz Mac Pro with 16Gb of RAM and the5770 graphics card crashes a lot....not as much as the new MBP (17" top of line), but still.

Disillusioned for sure, hope a fix is coming soon, or FCP 8 solves this.

I believe so.

Also Schwa72: is your "Automatic Graphics Switching" unchecked under Energy Saving in preferences?
If so, that explains why you're not crashing.

The 2011 Macbook Pro has the Sandy Bridge chipset right?

I found a few stories talking about a possible recall on the chipset.

http://www.infoworld.com/t/processors/sandy-bridge-recall-rippling-through-the-i ndustry-216

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-20030070-64.html

No, Automatic Graphics Switching is definitely checked.

Not applicable. The MacBook pros have the corrected rev b chipsets.

I'm experiencing the same thing on my 17" 2.3 8GB, 120GB SSD machine.

Under heavy load, the machine gets too hot to touch and eventually it freezes. Sometimes I have cursor control, sometimes not.

Has Apple made an official comment on this yet?

So much for it being a "Pro" machine if it can't handle some rendering.

I don't know if this is related to the issue being discussed.

While using MS Word 04 in OS X, I have these moments where, while fast scrolling through large documents, the document freezes for a couple of seconds, where there is no response to the 2 finger swiping. It soon resumes and jumps all over the place.

This happens while using integrated as well as the AMD GPU. Also, checking the activity monitor, when the scrolling freezes, the CPU shows 100% activity.

Any clues why this is happening?

RationalGaze,

I believe that issue is related to the old version of Office that you are running.

Do you have all the latest Service Packs from Microsoft installed?

Upgrading to either 2008 or even 2011 will resolve a lot of Office performance issues under Snow Leopard.

Sounds like a completely different issue. This issue is a complete ui freeze requiring a hard reset of the machine.

tested, same issue here. Looks like it is everyone

+1 with this issue. Often freezes when using handbrake and setting up a queues, or when running browser based flash games. Will keep cursor control but OS basically turn into a picture. Called apple yesterday, they suggested repair disk permissions, and empty cache folders, didn't help.

I hope apple addresses this issue soon.

2011 17" 2.2 i7 MBP

@John:

Thanks for the info! I've been able to re-create a lot of the crashes others have posted here (when I should of been studying haha) although i've only incidentally had it happen twice to me once while using Handbrake and once while playing SC:2.

I'll definitely be giving Apple a call after I've done my assignments to add my name to the list of users having problems and to see what they say. Sigh this is so frustrating, otherwise I just love it! Great improvement from my old portable.

JJ

Andrew Preece,

Thanks for your reply. I do have all the updates done. Will try to get the latest version of Word.

Also, my 2011 2.2 GHz 15" has the same freezing issue. SmallluxGPU took ~ 5 secs.