After an update to Lion the system seems to freeze when I switch the graphics adapter to NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT. The system just starts incredibly slow and is not usable from the very beginnig. It is almost impossible to even change the gfx card back to the on-board 9400M and reboot. (Macbook Pro late-2008 2.53)
Does anyone have any ideas? Help would be greatly appreciated.
MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.7.3)
Hey, I am glad I found this post. For weeks now I have been trying to figure out the cause for constant beach balls while running lion on my late 2008 MBP 2.93. It is to the point where my computer is no longer useable. I was always running my machine on the dedicated NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT. Last night I switched the GPU to the integrated 9400 and everything is running just fine. Several weeks ago I purchased a new SSD and installed a clean version of Lion on it. This whole time I was convinced it was a probelm with the new SSD but it is clearly as issue with the Nvidia Geforce 9600M GT. Strangely enough when I have the 9400 active and do a black magic speed test on the SSD I get the right speeds, but when I make the 9600 active the speed test results show that the drive is barely functioning.
Sorry I don't have any solutions for you. Did you ever manage to figure it out? Does anybody have a solution for this??
I also have this issue, cant understand why it is like this. What kind of SSD did you install?
I have a 120GB OWC Electra 6G SSD. What about you guys? This particular drive has been a bit promlematic actually. It ran ok in Snow Leopard but could only get a linkspeed of 1.5 but at least in Snow Leopard it was stable.
Took me forever to isolate this problem to the graphics card! I have the same issue of constant spinning beach ball of death with my MacBook Pro 5,1. I installed an OWC Electra 3G SSD and ran into the problem of applications freezing up non-stop. My solution was to switch to the 9400 graphics card and the system is back to blazing fast. Also, whenever my external monitor is plugged in through the DisplayPort (using either graphics card) the system starts freezing again.
This isn't much of a solution because I want to use the heavy-lifter GeForce9600 graphics card AND there's a huge external monitor on my desk that is now unusable.
Any solutions/fixes? Maybe an upgrade to Mountain Lion?
Here's the hardware involved:
MacBook Pro 5,1 2.53 Ghz
240GB OWC Electra 3G SSD
Nvidia 9400/9600
I also have a MBP 5,1
120g OWC Electra 3G SSD
Nvidia 9400/9600
Mountain Lion
I can confirm that using 9600 is not usable.
Currently using just the 9400. Boots up around 1min and 15sec (I learned to live with it)
Hope a software update can fix this.
Although the late 2008 Macbook Pro wth the 9600M GT is still considered supported by Apple, don't expect a fix for this. They resolved the blinking issue when using the GT card, but introduced a Freezing/Crashing/Lockup when GT graphics card is used.
So now you're forced to use the slower 9400M to keep from freezing when using the 9600M GT graphics card. It's almost 2014, and there is nearly zero posability that Apple will spend any time and effort investigatin and issuing a firmware fix for a product that is almost six years old.
Lion freezes Geforce 9600M GT
