Q: MacBook Pro 2011 17" hard freeze

I agree with byranlee... Also the issue was never observed under normal usage.. only when u stressed the system, which apparently has been resolved.

Again, as far as I know, not all macbooks had that issue (although were majority).

So relax its a great piece of hardware overall!

I'm a little relieved now .thanks

@Patranhadas

I think we eventually determined that the chrome/fish test had a warning on the page somewhere indicating that it was known to freeze machines. So this isn't really considered to be a good diagnostic indicator of the freezing problem. *You should be fine*.

please don't use the aquarium test to judge, its already been quoted as not a great test by many within this thread earlier... It uses WebGL and its not 100% bug free.

Even my 14-day ends this Thursday but after today's update I think I should say I'm satisfied.

Just to re-assure, try loading your system once with the applications you'd normally use at once and see how it responds. My guess is you should be fine.

Disclaimer: I'm no God

What you are seeing might be the GPU, but it could also be the wiring from the logic board to the display.

Try booting into Single user and see if it is shown in the text, (Command+S at startup)

If it is in the text lines it is display, if it isn't then it is something with the GPU.

I think smallluxgpu on the 4 or 8 core setting WITH GPU is the best test. There's no doubt that would take out a 10.6.6 thunderbolt/ATI mac. Just do the interactive render then use the arrow keys to change the view and like clockwork, it'll crash on 10.6.6. Would love to see more posts about this cvery test passing after the update. Seems like a lot of people are saying that the Aperture work or whatever they were doing is now working, but far as I can tell, this link is the definitive test.

Sorry to beat a dead horse guys - the moment I get a good feeling about it being fixed I am heading back to the apple store

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/33632/smallluxgpu/

Message was edited by: keggman12

DickDigggler wrote:
What you are seeing might be the GPU, but it could also be the wiring from the logic board to the display.

Try booting into Single user and see if it is shown in the text, (Command+S at startup)

If it is in the text lines it is display, if it isn't then it is something with the GPU.

i did what you wrote and it put the console style boot with all those things
at the end "if you wish to boot the system: exit"
what does this mean?
bad connection between the monitor and the rest?

but i still get the freezes.. and it's not only visual

I now get what you meant,
there were no glitches/artifacts during the console phase

All,

I think 10.6.7 fixed the issue.... at least for me.

2011 15" 2.2Ghz 8GB 6570M 256SSD (10.6.7)

Mike I have it unchecked and it still will hard freeze on me when encoding video files. It seems to help the problem, but not fix it.

fixed for me - Complied boost

ideazinfinite said:

"I agree with byranlee... Also the issue was never observed under normal usage.. only when u stressed the system, which apparently has been resolved.

Again, as far as I know, not all macbooks had that issue (although were majority).

So relax its a great piece of hardware overall!"

--------------

that's not correct, actually. it was observed under normal usage and light load. Mine crashed 3 or 4 times with nothing but Chrome, iTunes and Word open (light load). Whether the issue is resolved or not will be determined over the next couple of days. Not 3 hours after 10.6.7 has installed.

Things look good, but time will tell the story.

$0.02

Message was edited by: Adrian J.

I have an macbook 13" i5 and have not experienced this "yet". It looks like it happens on the 15 and 17" macs which have a ATI discrete card (I haven't read all the post).

This could be totally unrelated but I think its worth mentioning.

My secondary Lenovo laptop (had it for 2 years) has an ATI graphic card and it freezes randomly and Blue Screen with an error ati2dvag. It get more aggravated when the "red" trackball on Lenovo is used. The cause is a video driver which which went in an infinite loop and caused the computer to crash.

There was resolution posted on the windows site, but that did not help either.

Here is the link (for windows)
http://www.modernstreet.com/general/ati2dvag-problem/

I hope this helps.

Is this reproducible when the integrated Intel Card is used ?

Madhat, I just got off the phone with Apple Support as well, i performed the same SMC reset, while on the phone I had it freeze up on me again.

I can get it to freeze up every time by running handbrake and loading up a queue of 3-4 deep.

Hi guys,

I bought my BRAND new 17" Macbook Pro on March 10th, just 11 days ago.

When it arrived it didn't start crashing at first. Not until I bought an SSD drive for my expresscard slot. That night it crashed hard repeatedly. I assumed it was a bad SSD card so I packed it up and returned it. But the laptop keeps crashing. I don't know if the SSD card exacerbated the problem but when the laptop is under a lot of load, I noticed the temperature shoots up to 183-198 range. Then it locks up. The screen freezes, my mouse still works, and I can still hear music and noise from the game I play in the background.

I can't run it in integrated mode because I use an external monitor. I need discrete mode for the external to work.

One other thing I've noticed is that when I run the external at its native resolution, I see tons of specks of white lights (pixels) lighting up to white for a millisecond then disappearing. All over the screen and it's especially noticable on dark backgrounds. Lower the resolution and this goes away. But the native resolution is what I'd like to run it on.

AFter about 2 dozen reboots this weekend, I went to the local apple store this morning and while I waited for my turn to see the "Genius", I managed to crash another 17" laptop in the store doing the same thing.. photobooth + yes > /dev/null

When it was my turn, the guy asked me to make it crash. It took a long while (the store is cold and my laptop was cold) but it crashed just as the guy was trying to run something on it. He tried to get it to crash again, but it didn't in the small amount of time he tried. (He was juggling me and 2 others so he was rushing).

I mentioned to the guy that many others are reporting this same behaviour but he brushed it off saying that if you look for something on the internet, you're going to find it, even lots of people complaining about the same thing. He said he only knows of a single known problem with these laptops but that it doesn't affect me as I don't use whatever peripheral he mentioned (I forget what it was).

As a result of the visit to the apple store, I'm having this laptop returned for a new one. The new one has already been ordered. I just wait for it to arrive now.

If the next one crashes as this one did, then they would need to run diagnostics on it (instead of just giving me a new one).

We'll see what a new laptop brings.