Mountain Lion freezing

I got a confession to make.

Nothing has been done to my computer regardless of all the problems it has been having, but something happpened last night. My computer started working better, no more beach-balling, lagging, stalling, or freezing. it was working the way it should, fast and smooth. Today it has been working allmost 100% better, just a few minor beach-balling.

What the heck happened? I have no idea. Maybe Apple fixed it without my knowledge, or maybe ML fixed itself in the background.

Hopefully it will continue to work better. Let's wait and see.

Sorry about the GPU question, I was not aware. As you can see I am no expert.

Just did a research on GPU and you were right, and I also noticed they call it VPU.

Oh well, I just learned something new.

Thank you,

Hi Jozie,

I was at the service point today. I showed them the photos and logs. Now i get my Board replaced . . . again. Only if you have apple care.

It is a not so rare failure with the ATI-GPU's.

the solution is a board change for free, in the hope to get a good board (or a new one (or simply a NVIDIA chipset???)) back from the repair pool.

hope this helps.

regards

Hello there,

i got my board replaced in 30 minutes. They ordered yesterday, it delivered today.

reason: faulty GPU - everything runs fine for now.

they told me if you in guarantee time you should get a new board, not a one from the repair pool.

good luck

ps: this was not an apple store it was just a authorized apple dealer

I don't think it is/was a graphics hardware issue for me. I never had the screen corrupted, visually, as you describe - it just froze.

However, it interests me what keith181 says above, as that has been my experience these past 2 weeks as well: I have done nothing in the last 14 days (besides installing 10.8.1) and my machine has only crashed twice in that time - the first time was before I installed 10.8.1, so it has only frozen once since then. Before that, it was freezing a couple of times a day. It is also fast and zippy and not sluggish (nor was it, before).

But I do have an interesting thing to report with my My Book backup hard drive which leads me to wonder whether our problems could be due to non-Apple external HDs?? And/or Time Machine functioning with these??

I bought the My Book in May, from the Apple Store - so it was not old. Yesterday, I got an error message telling me that my machine had not been backed up for 10 days(!!) (bit late notice - 10 days is quite a long time!!).

When I checked, the My Book HD light was flashing on and off. My iMac was unable to see the HD to back up to it and it wasn't on the desktop either. I disconnected the Firewire connection, then reconnected it - nope. I disconnected the power supply...

...and the My Book wouldn't power on - it was dead, even when connected to a power source.

The curious thing was that the last time it backed up was 2nd Sept. This was the day I got back from holiday, and I know I downloaded 10.8.1 that day. So it seemed to be ok backing up with 10.8 (although it was crashing all the time) - but it had never backed up with 10.8.1

I checked for a Firmware update, and sure enough on 4th Sept there was a Firmware update for the My Book - except I didn't know that and hadn't downloaded it.

I just took the My Book back to the Apple Store and exchanged it for another one, and this one came with the Firmware update from a week ago already on it. It seems to be working fine and is backing up now.

So I think ML basically killed my My Book... And perhaps something hadn't been working right there and had caused freezing etc.

So: All you guys with external HDs who are experiencing this problem, check for firmware updates. If that doesn't work, try stopping Time Machine backups and see if the freezing stops.

Seems to be possible. USB somtimes frags a machine into its pieces, trying to unplug external devices to find the freezing/failures source is a good start.

but, Just in case you see a

GPU Debug Info Start

in your system log, and you have freezes and hangs at the same time, with our without scrambled display - You should let apple switch your mainboard, don't wait for a patch.

if you try to repoduce a freeze, always have an eye on your computers-temperature.

unplug everything, open your Browser and treat the machine hard width multiple Browsers windows running HD-Videos from youtube (make it five 1080p vid's windowed, arrange them so you see all vid's at the same time). Wait for some time. If you have a Board (GPU) failure, for me, this was the best way to reproduce it. All the board's i had worked normally in the beginning.

I used the Mac width the new Board as normal since yesterday, I looked some high res youtube vids (would have killed it before).

Everything seems to be back to normal.

have luck

I am back with an update of my ML experience. Last Sunday, later in the evening, I started having very good experience with ML. The good experience continued for two more days, but after that it has returned to all it's problems again.

Today I had to re-boot my computer twice and re-start it once.

Best way to describe ML that it is "JUNK" and so far I have not seen any update since I had it installed back in July. All that time and there is no solution yet.

Yesterday I installed the iTunes update and this had no effect either way, all my problems were before and after the update.

No other changes have taken place since those 3 wonderful days of no problems.

It is even taking me a while to type this message because it keeps stalling every other sentence I type.

Bottom line, Mountain Lion is a piece of JUNK!

hey keith,

A lot of people have ML installed and no problem with the exact same hardware as you have

if you did a fresh install and you still have freezes you should consider also a possible hardware fail or overheating.

Software normally can't fix hardware, you may tell software not to use some piece of hardware so intense as usual (power, clockspeed, rpm, ect.) but you can't fix hardware with it.

good luck

Hey Keith,

I am having the exact same issue as you did ever since upgrading to Mountain Lion on my Mac Pro 2008.1 with ATI 5870 HD. I never ever had a single freeze in Lion, neither in bootcamped Windows 7. Since day 1 of Mountain Lion I get 2-3 freezes per day forcing me to hard reset. GPU temp is around 35-40 degrees Celcius when crashing and happens totally randomly. Sometimes when viewing video through VLC, sometimes when on Youtube, sometimes when I am not even on the computer. I come back and it frooze up. Sound and mouse cursor still work.

As I still need Mountain Lion for development, I have reinstalled Lion on another partition. I now triple-boot between Windows 7 / OSX 10.7 and OSX 10.8. Only OSX 10.8 has the freezing issue, which makes me doubt my hardware is at fault, unless OSX 10.8 uses it in some specific way the other OS'es don't... In another thread it was claimed that it was due to an incompatible application, but I refuse to accept that. If an application is able to freeze your entire OS, something is wrong in how your OS manages its processes.

Anyway, I just hope things will improve in 10.8.2 so I can cut back on the rebooting times 😀

So, after beeing totally fed up with not beeing able to predict when the next Crash will come and having a non reliable system (continuous work wasn't possible at all) , I got hold on a copy of the latest 10.8.2 Developer beta (Build 12C53). Since installing it, I have not seen a crash again or scrambled Screen anymore. Hope this will continue to work well 😀

I haven't installed 10.8.2 but my system is now also stable and hasn't crashed in the last 2 weeks.

I do think that deleting old apps as per my instructions above had a lot to do with it. I also suspect my external HD firmware needed updating. Anyway, all is smooth and good again now for me. Hope you all get it sorted soon if you're still having problems.

And there goes the Neighborhood :/ The first Freeze for more than 4 Days 😟

I can't stand this any more Apple! Tim Cook, I will send you a Picture of a MacBook Pro that is splitted with a large Hammer if this will not stop! There isn't a Hardware Failure! I cannot download Lion from the App Store anymore in order to downgrade, because I'm told Mountain Lion is actually more up to date. On my other Mac it isn't downloadable because it has got a Core Duo, which isn't supported by Lion as I'm told from the Pop-up. Come on, this can't be reality. This is total BS! I don't want to install Lion on a Core Duo, only download it again, in order to generate a bootable USB Stick with it. All these Freezes (mostly on a bit older Hardware) generate the Feeling, that this is another way to generate more Revenue. Get newer Hardware People, go out and buy it. Be blown away by our massive Success and start all over again!

Whoever did find some Irony did understand 😉

I have a Similar problem since upgrade... couples months already..

Pages: making a right click.. Spinning wheel of death...

Office 2011 right click.... Spinning wheel of death...

Transmission on right click... Spinninf wheel of death....

At first i ive made a clean install of mountain lion.. probleme still there...

Whats wrong with the OS? I never had this problem before the upgrade and seem theres no sulution at all at the moment....

its frustrating!

FIX IT!

Well, experiencing the same issue here.

More than a year with Lion and nothing to complain. A couple months with Mountain Lion and dozens of "death freezing".

I hope Apple fix this soon because it's very sad to work with this trouble.

Sorry if this has been mentioned already, but I didn't wade through all 17 pages of the thread.

For video freezes, make sure you're no longer running an outdated version of a video format plug-in, asuch as Flip4Mac or Perian. That was the problem in my case. Updating Flip4Mac to the latest beta eliminated the freezing.