Q: MacBook Pro 2011 17" hard freeze

That *****. Yours sounds like hardware if you're getting it in Windows as well.

Your MacBook Pro has a specific issue that has nothing to do with the one discussed here. The issue discuss here doesn't show any artifact on the main screen, being the like the ones you are showing on your screenshot or any other. It just freeze without any artifact.

You should bring your MacBook Pro to Apple to get it fixed, it's clear that it has a specific hardware issue that must be repaired.

No error messages logged. It's exactly the same symptoms. The thing is it isn't load that seems to kill it for me. As mentioned it still happens with only 50% of a single core in use and the rest idle.

Apple Hardware diagnostics report no issues. The fact that everything starts slowing down just before the crash suggests to me that it is in fact a software issue.

I can understand how people can't make it happen because it takes a long time for it to happen to me. It's also very frustrating, as it's so difficult to reproduce and yet wastes an enourmous amount of time when it does happen.

To those who think I have a faulty machine can you think of anything hardware-wise that would cause:

1) System-wide slowdowns 5-10 seconds before the freeze
2) No error messages to be logged to Console
3) The mouse pointer to not always freeze, sometimes even allowing switching between applications after the freeze
4) Responses to the network even after the freeze

To me these are identical symptoms to pre-10.6.7, just that they are significantly less frequent.

To give you an example of one time it happened. I was restoring a backup in VMWare Fusion (not VirtualBox on this occasion). The restore had been running approximately 1 hour 45 minutes. I was simultaneously watching a Flash video in Firefox in OSX (ie not in the VM). The video suddenly went down to ~2fps. I immediately closed Firefox, which took about 8 seconds to do because the machine was lagging so badly. I switched to the VM and hit "Suspend". VMware displayed the suspending message and then the mouse pointer froze.

I wish I could reproduce this more readily but as it stands all I know is I have been unable to restore this backup in SBS 2003 in a VM on my Early 2011 MBP running 10.6.7 as it freezes before completion every single time.

EDIT because of your light post that lead to a clear explanation:

Nothing abnormal with your symptoms. It just looks like you put too much memory assigned to your VM. This is quite clear as you state the system is slowing down before "freezing", which is typical to RAM overloading and heavy use of virtual memory (swap).

I can reproduce identical symptoms with any OS, launching a VM with too much memory assigned compared to what is left free for the tasks on the host OS. I had it everyday on my work computer, which is a regular Desktop Core2Duo PC under Linux with 4GB of RAM, when I had assigned 1GB of RAM to my Windows XP VM, while I was running Eclipse + Apache + Tomcat + PHP + MySQL + Firefox with 20 tabs on the Linux host while on the VM I was just running Internet Explorer 7.

The host didn't have enough free memory, and so started to swap badly, and I couldn't do everything, even the mouse freezed for some times and when repsonded, was very slow. Since I drop the memory of the VM to 512MB, it solved the issue.
Had the same issue on Windows running Linux VM, and all my previous Macs in similar conditions.

So what you are reporting has nothing to do with the present issue and is normal behavior of a system that don't have any RAM left and have operations running that do a lot of RAM access, which becomes disk read/write access as the system use the swap (virtual memory) when no more physical RAM is available.

There is no error logged, because there is no crash, just the system is overloaded. If you were on Linux, you would see the system load indicator to be full and the system would be sluggish and frozen. This can last for a very long time if the processes overloading the system are not releasing the load, in fact it can last forever if the processes working are not releasing some resources which may require to kill them.

Solution: Reduce the amount of RAM assigned to your VM.

Hi there. I was me that was doing the panicking as I was just about to lose about 2 hours' progress No kernel panic. Just a freeze. No errors logged. Nothing on the screen except my sad frozen VM plus a few other apps.

See my new message, nothing abnormal in what you are reporting. Easily reproducible on any OS and any computer in similar conditions. More significant if you have a latop with a 5400RPM HDD, but also happens easily with 7200RPM HDD and can happen even with SSD drives.

You are right,
all other symptoms were the same, but no one ever showed such artifacts on the display
and I had the windows os glitches as well from the start,
that should be the obvious clue to check the hardware first

Apple won't take my computer back unless I give it back to the reseller i bought it from, which is in Vienna and I can't reach them on my cost and any soon

They suggested using an Apple Service Provider to replace any faulty hardware.. and i'm cool with that as far as they will make it work

For what it's worth, it just happened again. I had a hunch that it was not the VM alone causing the freezes. For me, all I did was open a website that used Flash while the VM was busy restoring the backup. That was enough to freeze the machine up after 10 seconds or so of beachballing.

My guess is Flash is firing up the discrete graphics, as that seems to be closely related to this case.

So The conclusion is that New update fixes the freezing problem right?

Do you by chance have after market memory installed? One other poster discovered that after resinstalling the original Apple memory, 10.6.7 had in fact solved there problem. Another poster did some tests that indicated 10.6.7 might have changed memory timing.

Anyone, a total shot in the dark, but worth throwing out there.

Interesting. Very interesting. Yes, I do have aftermarket memory installed. I shall try that. I had assumed that since the memory all passes the tests it was fine but if the timing has changed who knows.

I've had my MBP freeze by running VirtualBox. Not doing anything; just having it run Windows 7 and idle while also idle with my Mac apps. No fans spinning. Turned away for a few moments; turned back, and only the mouse pointer moves. All else is frozen. The solution others came up with was to boot to 32-bit mode (hold down "3" and "2" when starting the Mac); I guess there's a problem with VirtualBox running on a 64-bit machine.

So maybe this is 64-bit related, depending on the app?

shishlik wrote:
So The conclusion is that New update fixes the freezing problem right?

Yes, the new update DOES fix the issue initially posted in this thread. There seems to be a VERY small number of people who say this didn't work but in most of those cases it seems to be:

A different issue.
A faulty machine.


It's very simple guys, the original issue was easily reproducible. 10.6.7 does fix this issue.

spstanley wrote:
I've had my MBP freeze by running VirtualBox. Not doing anything; just having it run Windows 7 and idle while also idle with my Mac apps. No fans spinning. Turned away for a few moments; turned back, and only the mouse pointer moves. All else is frozen. The solution others came up with was to boot to 32-bit mode (hold down "3" and "2" when starting the Mac); I guess there's a problem with VirtualBox running on a 64-bit machine.

So maybe this is 64-bit related, depending on the app?

Virtualbox for osx has been unstable with 64 bit kernel from jump. Anyone having issues with virtualbox crashes are having a totally unrelated problem. It's well known and ALL OVER the vbox forums.

I'm using parallels 6 for my vm's and having NO ISSUES.

I highly recommend using "Tuxera NTFS" and "Parallels 6" if you can afford it and need to run a windows vm.

The reason is: with this, you can install windows 7 via bootcamp and use your bootcamp install as a vm (note: you can do this without Tuxera but the free NTFS doesn't seem to work with 64 bit kernels)