10.7.2 Lion freezing / apps lock up, must hard reset 2-3 times daily

I am having the exact same issue as above on both my two new Mac's. One is a 15" MacBook Pro Laptop 2.2GHz and the other is a new iMac 22" Desktop. We are having to reoot 2-3 times a day because of this. We do have a 2TB time capsule and it currently turned for backups. Apple please fix this it is very annoying!

It's not just you. I've had the exact same/similar issue with my 2010 MBP. It seems to have gotten worse since the release of the new iTunes 10.5.1 though. I've also noticed that if I let the system sleep for more than a few minutes with iTunes downloading it will also lockup. I too have reinstalled the OS to no avail. I do like much of what Lion has to offer, I just wish it offered a solid/stable experience. 😟

I'm experiencing a completel freeze up of my system (Beach Ball) whenever Time Machine kicks in. It takes it about 10 to 15 seconds to cancel a time machine backup and then eventually, I am able to use my machine again. This just started a few days ago.

Indeed, many people complain about ‘freezing, slow behavior, spinning wheel...’. As far as they are indeed a Lion issue (some are not), then in most cases the explanation is simple: they are very probably due to older apps incompatible with Lion. The occurrence is higher because Apple removed the basic erase-and-install method, so most users also transfer these older apps. If they automatically start up upon logging in, here are the problems.

The solution is to delete these old(er) apps or, if a good backup is done, an erase-and-install, therefore not upgrade from SL, as default with Lion. This can be achieved by booting Lion installer from an external drive / flash drive, and run Disk Utility before installation proper. I repeat: make a good backup first. In fact, backup is useful in general, mandatory in such a case.

If I were to blame Apple it is because this upgrade default method also transfers problems and incompatibility issues, an erase-and-install method would much reduce such problems.

add me to the list, Sarfari locks up 2-3 times a day just sarfari though nothing else. I'm able to get to the login Windows and restart that way. Looking forward to a fix......

Do you have Sophos Anti Virus Installed?

Time Machine Backup with Sophos causes untold Mayhem....Remove Sophos and see how your system behaves!

Cattus Thraex wrote:

Indeed, many people complain about ‘freezing, slow behavior, spinning wheel...’. As far as they are indeed a Lion issue (some are not), then in most cases the explanation is simple: they are very probably due to older apps incompatible with Lion. The occurrence is higher because Apple removed the basic erase-and-install method, so most users also transfer these older apps. If they automatically start up upon logging in, here are the problems.

The solution is to delete these old(er) apps or, if a good backup is done, an erase-and-install, therefore not upgrade from SL, as default with Lion. This can be achieved by booting Lion installer from an external drive / flash drive, and run Disk Utility before installation proper. I repeat: make a good backup first. In fact, backup is useful in general, mandatory in such a case.

If I were to blame Apple it is because this upgrade default method also transfers problems and incompatibility issues, an erase-and-install method would much reduce such problems.

I wish it were so simple in my case. A clean install of Lion on a new iMac, the only apps and utilities were new versions, reset PRAM, ran that utility by Apple (I forget its name). Glitches and annoyances still. Mercifully, no actual crashes, constant restarts or othe rmajor problems. I'm living with it.

Hm... what are the specific issues?

I have Sophos and Time Machine and it works fine. I exclude the Time Machine and External drives from scan. I suggest using the process utility to see if anything is taking a lot of cpu. If you find nothing there, disconnect all usb and firewire peripherals, reboot, and see if it clears. If so, restore them one by one until you find the culprit.

When I installed Lion, I could not get past the logon screen. Tried evertyhing I could think of. Then I disconnected peripherals. It worked. I then reconnected the peripherals and have never had the problem since. I guess it needed to load a driver once.

Was that Sophos AV compatible with Lion? Do you really need an AV software?

Yes, the Sophos AV is compatible with Lion. The need is debatable. Many say no, but in my mind better safe than sorry. I comingle Windows files and Mac files on my mac. Another way to fix the time machine issue is to disable the network scanning feature in Sophos.

For the time being, AV software in Mac OS has mainly (read exclusively) the role of removing Windows viruses spread over the net, in most cases as e-mail attachments. If you feel safer with an AV software, try to use ClamXav, it is a low resource and reliable AV software.

This is, of course, a lateral route of the initial discussion.

same issues, worst os ever. never had these issues before. wish i had never upgraded to lion, snow leopard worked perfectly. constant freezes, constant reboots.

Cattus Thraex wrote:

Hm... what are the specific issues?

I launch iPhoto, use it a few times, and it hangs, requiring a restart of the iMac;

iPhoto complains that I am not connected to the Internet (when trying to display GPS data) when I am fully connected

Magic Mouse's connection drops about every 15 to 40 minutes of typing, often in this Discussion. Apple Care suggested that keeping my battery charge above 50% would solve it. It didn’t.(My batteries are Apple’s, as is the charger.);

When I return my hand to the Magic Mouse, the active window often suddenly scrolls up which looses the position of the pointer. This can cause problems in graphical apps like InDesign;

Mail's boxes display a small triangle every few days and will not send or receive, requiring Mail to be re-launched;

In Mail I cannot get pictures of people to appear in messages sent by them.

In Mail, stationery does not work properly. Neither of these two is an earth-shattering fault, but having been offered them I wasted a lot of time trying to get them to work.)

Time Machine three times over the last 1 1/2 years (OS 10.5 once and Lion twice) has complained that its HD is full when it is only ~1/2 full. A full reset on the last two did not cure it (I had not discovered Pondini's Full Reset until Lion). Pondini's symptom's and solutions did not match the error. Each time I had to erase and start again;

A couple of months ago, as a test, (after confirming my daily bootable backup of my system done by Carbon CopyCloner), I re-installed Lion from the InstallED.dmg, accepted the invitation to restore from TM, and upgraded to 7.2. All looked well except Mail displayed only the Header and first two lines of the body of messages, all the rest of the bodies were blank. Another major thing did not work after this re-installation (I can't remember the details now);

Carbon Copy Cloner can fail to find its Firewire backup HD about every 10th time (I have a daily schedule). The connections to the drive are plugged in OK but the drive is no longer mounted, whether the iMac has been restarted or woken up. CCC has been absolutely rock solid for years until Lion;

My Canon scanner (current driver, and it always worked before Lion), more times than not complains that it cannot start because it is in use elsewhere. I have to unplug its USB and re-connect.

In SystemPrefs > iCloud, a dialogue box said that Sys. Prefs. wants to use confidential info in my keychain. I press “Deny” and the box returns for ever until I force quit Sys. Prefs.

Software Update repeatedly tells me that a certain update is available but I already have installed it.

For those silly enough to install a new OS within a year of its introduction (not me: my iMac came with the wretched thing in it), some bugs can be expected, but not this many (at least in my opinion). All previous updates going back to 1997 have gone much more smoothly than Lion on my machines.

Although I am in a minority (given the huge number of sales of Lion – although MacWorld reports that sales of Lion are faltering), I am sorry to say that I have fallen out of love with Apple. I would gladly trade the elegance and the fancy features for a bit of “Works out of the box”, “It just works”, “Computing for the rest of us”.

I'm leaving this thread. It appears that it's gotten off topic from what I was struggling with. My issue is specifically with Time Machine Backups with the latest version of Lion causing everything to freeze.

If anyone else's freezing problem is specific to Time Machine backup, I encourage you to follow this thread: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3510354

Hoping they get this resolved.