macbook air freeze

any one try this yet as a solution, it was just posted in the Google Chrome Forum by one of the developers.

I haven't installed Chrome. and also never access You tube or any of Flash enabled website.

Just boot up with 32bit kernel mode and installed Dropbox, then it's hanging.

I isolated the problem to 32 bit kernel mode issue.

Confirmation from google on the chrome issue. Not sure about you all having issues outside chrome. Probably a graphics leak like the chrome problem being exploited by other parts of the system or software.

http://www.macrumors.com/2012/06/29/google-chrome-causing-freezing-and-crashing- on-new-mac-notebooks/

For me this has happened twice on my new MBA (i7, 8GB, 256GB); never while using Google Chrome. The last time, today, I was in Safari as a matter of fact, watching a webinar that used a Java Applet, and had iTunes open (but not playing) in the background. Both times, it has frozen hard, and neither time was I running Chrome. I would suspect that Chrome is making a call that triggers the panic, but other apps do at times as well (just Chrome perhaps more often than most). Probably something Apple will need to fix, ultimately.

We also have a new 2012 13" Macbook Air with 8 GB and it freezes within a few minutes while running under 32-bit mode. The screen usually shows many lines of garbage pixels as well. My wife needs to use the Cisco VPN software, which her company hasn't updated in 5 years so she needs to run under 32-bit mode for it to work. The computer runs fine in 64-bit mode.

I'm also having this issue. I have had mid 2011 MBA for ~2months and till yesterday I had no problem. Then yesterday, when I woke MBA from sleep, after putting in security password, it woke then froze immediately. Trackboard didn't work. The keyboard didn't register either. So I had to restart by pressing on the power button.

Then today, it happened today again, this time after waking from sleep and while on safari.

Neither cases I used chrome, so I don't know what the heck is going on.

I have not had a freeze like that for a couple of weeks - Applecare wanted to pin it on a bad USB hub, but I have run with and without the hub between the MBA and the Time Machine external drive with no difference in behavior.

I currently have an issue with not being able to eject the Time Machine drive unless I force it to eject. The symptoms are as follows from a few days ago:

A Reboot allows the external USB drive and all of its volumes to be ejected and I can remount them with Disk Utility

If I turn Time Machine on, enter Time Machine, cancel Time Machine and eject the drive I have no problem

Remount Time Machine drive with Disk Utility

Perform "Backup Now" with Time Machine then stop it from the Finder and eject the drive - works fine.

Remount Time Machine drive with Disk Utility

Perform "Backup Now" with Time Machine then stop it from the Time Machine drop down menu and eject the drive - works fine.

Remount Time Machine drive with Disk Utility

Perform "Backup Now" with Time Machine and let it run to completion then try to eject the drive - get the following Console messages:

7/8/12 8:14:02.985 AM com.apple.backupd: Backup completed successfully.

{after this message I open Finder and try to eject the Time Machine drive; get a box asking if I want to dismount both partitions; answer yes; get box saying that it can't unmount Time Machine because something may be using it followed by the next two messages}

7/8/12 8:14:49.156 AM com.apple.backupd: Stopping backup to allow backup destination disk to be unmounted or ejected.

7/8/12 8:14:50.059 AM com.apple.backupd: Backup failed because the destination disk was ejected or disconnected unexpectedly!

These two messages appear to be in conflict: if "Backup completed successfully" then why is the next line announcing that my attempt to eject the drive is causing the backup process to be stopped?

Perhaps there are two different processes involved in the backup and one reports completion while the other one never completes and continues to tie up the drive?

Is anyone else seeing this kind of behavior?

Oh yes - the crashes that I am getting from time to time seems to associated with the process "mds" the indexing routine that works for both Time Machine and Spotlight.

I agree, I use nothing but Safar 6.0 with OS X version 10.8 on my MBA Mid 2012 2GHz Core i7 8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3 and I have had this same random freeze since July 13th. Been working with Apple Support since then and seem to have elminated everything but the Intel HD Graphics 4000. We have done a complete erase and reinstall using Command "R" Restart which takes you to the OS X utilities. After that process doing a complete erase with the Disk Utility and a Re-install using the OS X Lion Re-install, I still have the issue. This was done to eleminate software issues and you must use only the software installed with this process, NO ADDED SOFTWARE. Waiting on response from Apple this week.

same problem here

MBA, mid-2011, i5, 2gb ram with Mountain Lion and Safari 6.0

MBA just freezes randomly, but prior to this the fans seem to spin at full speed. Activity Monitor doesn't show any process to load CPU or smth...

it's quite annoying and hope Apple fixes this issue ASAP.

@Striboi - have the same make and specs as you do and have been struggling with this issue for awhile now. The hardware checks out ok, so it has to be something in Lion or ML that is tripping things up. My guess for our particular situation is lack of RAM and how OS X handles RAM. I have a memory monitor running in my menu bar and can see when some webpages or apps just completely nuke whatever free RAM is available and the system will usually freeze up unless you can free up more RAM. I talked with an Apple Genius off the record who told me flat out that Apple never should have sold the 2011 Airs with only 2 gigs of RAM installed...basically it is not enough RAM to keep things going with Lion or Moutain Lion...He said 4 gigs of RAM should have always been the baseline RAM for the 2011 models. For what it's worth!

An update for SMC on the MBA was released recently (I don't know the release date what the scope of the update was but my mid-2012 MBA was included). It installed last night via SW Update. Others watching this topic might want to run Update and see if they get any relief.

There have been a few other Lion updates over the last month, one of which fixed a problem with not being abe to eject the partition of an external hard drive that contained the Time Machine backup files.

There is apparently still an issue with Sophos 8.0 interfering with Spotlight or Time Machine. I belive Sophos is aware of the problem. You may be able to work around it by setting Sophos to update less often (with some potential risk).

no updates on my mac

just got a freeze yesterday... it's getting quite annoying... and it comes out of the blue... ((

Am experiencing same issues but do not use Chrome (not even installed...)

Frequency of crashing seems to have gone down, but the behavior when it crashes appears to be of two different types:

1 - the screen is blank and the machine unresponsive but clearly not off since pressing the power button will not cause it to restart (until after you have held it down for the required 6 sec to shut it down first)

2 - progressive failure with spinning beachball; usually can open the Dock and attempt to start another process (for me it is almost always Activity Monitor to see what is going on - assuming it was not already running); after a few seconds even the Dock freezes in whatever condition it was in at that instant; beachball continues to spin.

At this point you can wait as long as you want and nothing will change (I have not waited overnight).

After a restart, Console will show that Time Machine was actively doing a backup when the failure occurred, but nothing else. Sometimes there are other things going on in parallel (Google Update, Sophos Update are common) but those processes happen in conjunction with Time Machine backups at other times without causing any issues.

And it happened again just as I clicked on the "edit" button for the post above (and the site went off-line while I was typing an addendum).

This time the initial symptom was an unresponsive Firefox, and when I tried to launch Activity Monitor the menu and the CPU monitor showed up but the Activity Monitor window did not open and the menus were unresponsive when I tried to open it.

I next tried to quit Eudora from the Dock and the Dock froze, leaving me with a spinning beachball which I could drive around the screen with the mouse but with no additional functionality.

Here are the last few lines from the Console log prior to and including the restart:

8/5/12 6:18:09.549 AM com.apple.backupd: Backup completed successfully.

8/5/12 6:47:10.300 AM [0x0-0xc70c7].org.mozilla.thunderbird: Warning: unrecognized command line flag -foreground

8/5/12 6:49:17.216 AM firefox: -_scrollPhase is deprecated for NSScrollWheel. Please use -momentumPhase.

8/5/12 6:54:11.489 AM [0x0-0xcb0cb].org.mozilla.firefox: NOTE: child process received `Goodbye', closing down

8/5/12 6:57:58.865 AM com.apple.backupd: Starting standard backup

8/5/12 6:57:58.995 AM com.apple.backupd: Backing up to: /Volumes/Time Machine/Backups.backupdb

8/5/12 6:57:59.000 AM kernel: nspace-handler-set-snapshot-time: 1344175080

8/5/12 6:57:59.351 AM com.apple.backupd: 2.85 GB required (including padding), 208.95 GB available

8/5/12 7:07:09.000 AM bootlog: BOOT_TIME 1344175629 0

I just noticed that the issue showed up immediately before the beginning of the Time Machine backup started.