Mountain Lion freezing

Exactly same problem here. Freezing and not accepting the password for logon. MBP late 2011.

I tried the OnyX with no sucess.

The only thing that fix the problem was the update of the firmware of my SSD Crucial M4.

I have been experiencing this exact problem every day since upgrading to Mountain Lion. Especially when doing anything graphics-intensive (editing photos/movies, watching YouTube, playing games, etc.) the system freezes without fail. The graphics glitch and freeze, but I am still free to move the mouse, and sound still comes out of the speakers.

I have tried reinstalling all my software, I have tried a complete fresh install of Mountain Lion, I have deleted my plug-ins, I have now updated all the firmware for every drive in or attached to my computer, and STILL I continue to get these freezes. I know this is not a hardware issue, because I never experienced this issue before Mountain Lion, and I do not experience it with Windows through Boot Camp.

Incredibly frustrating and disappointing. We are now several months and three versions into this operating system, and my top-of-the-line Mac Pro is essentially useless. I'm losing out on productivity (i.e. $) and Apple seems to be doing nothing about it.

I guess I'm part of a group of people that his computer have this balloon cursor a couple of times a week. I have a Mac Mini mid-2011 with the mountain lion upgrade included but downloaded. I didn't want to loose the 20$Can offer about the upgrade. I just hope they'll fix this soon.

I did some digging:

Booted Mac mini with D pressed in order to get the diagnostic screen. Ran it 5 times on extended check. Came clean every time. But it tooks me 20 reboots in order to get that diagnostic screen. The mouse and pad didn't work in the diagnostic. Had to make it work with the keyboard.

My system:

I have Mac mini basic (600$Can) upgraded with SSD Kingston V200 250Gb and a memory upgrade to 8Gb. I have Apple Magic Mouse, Keyboard and touch-pad connected via Bluetooth. I'm using it in French Canadian version. The keyboard is also french canadian.

What I did after installing SSD:

Installed from Time Machine backup option when booting with an empty disk.

What I did recently:

Installed last friday the OS X server for 20$Can. It didn't change anything about the problem.

Recurrence:

It seems to happens a couple of times in a row and after sometimes in the week. When I play StarCraft II, it frozes the computer one out of three times. In that game, it happens often after the login; sometimes after quit.

I hope those informations are useful and a solution can be found sooooOOOOoooonnn.

Regards.

SOLUTION for my iMac:

I have been following this thread for a while and was completely frustrated with my iMac as well. I am still waiting for help from Apple... but have found a SOLUTION for my computer myself!!!

Search for applications you have on your iMac and then determine if they are compatible with Mountian Lion. I found a few applications on my system that were not supported by Mountin Lion on this link.

I deleted those specific applications and my computer has not had one freeze up since!!!!

Good luck!!! 🙂

After a few days without freezing, it froze up this morning. 😟

😟 I will be doing a full restore and reinstall soon and will post the results. Turns out I don't need to spend money on an external hard drive to hold my stuff. I have about 6 hard drives and all I have to do is buy a caddy for one and then format it!

I've been having increasing numbers of lockups this week without any apparent changes. Retina MBP, 10.8.2, 2.3 ghz i7, 256 gig SSD and 8 gigs of ram. I can't really correlate them, but they all behave similarly; an app locks up (this is variable - sometimes it's iTunes, Mail, Chrome or Safari), then when I go to force quit, I get the beach ball in the force quit app and the system becomes unresponsive. I can move the cursor around, but can't quit anything, and have to hard reset.

Almost every time it happens, I boot into recovery mode and scan the volume, but no errors at all. I dislike immensely that it's happening with increasing regularity.

I've thought about it, but I definitely need my laptop on a daily basis, so I'm stuck with it the way it is now. I'm incredibly frustrated by it, believe me. It's also frustrating that I can't seem to correlate it with anything! Like some I've had problems when opening my laptop from sleep-awake, where I can't login. Other times, I'll be browsing the internet and it will lock up unexpectedly. Sometimes it will be while answering an email or looking through my iTunes library. I really cannot find any reproducible situation that I could even show the techs at an Apple store.

I realize that it's hard to diagnose something that's as nebulous as this, but the behavior is the same in every lockup even if the circumstances are not; as I stated earlier, a program locks up, and then the entire system locks up when trying to force quit the application. On one occasion I went to reboot the machine instead of going to the force quit dialog, and it took nearly 30 minutes to shut down and reboot as it waited for every program I had open to time out, "stop" the reboot process, and then get killed. At least it was able to reboot at the end of that, though.

The really frustrating part is that this is a relatively new replacement for a unibody MBP I had stolen from me several years ago. I'd been greatly looking forward to not only a new laptop, but a reliable laptop. My unibody was the best machine I've ever owned, and was more stable than anything. I've frankly had more problems with this machine locking up than I can remember having with any machine (mac or PC) that I've ever owned. I'm not sure if I can associate it strictly with the 10.8.2 update, but subjectively speaking it seems to have greatly spiked its frequency since the update came out.

I'm not entirely convinced it's the hardware is the problem. Especially with such a relatively new machine! Like many here, I suspect it's an issue with 10.8.2 rather than my actual hardware, especially since it seems to be happening across a wide array of configurations and machines.

Supplementary informations...

When I try to update through the Apple menu - Update (actually it is Mise à jour de logiciels... because I have the french version), the update freeze 3 times out of 4 with that rotating balloon. The menu become unaccessible.

I had to update :

Safari 6.0.2

XCode 4.5.2

iPhoto 9.4.2

Regards.

@Profbobo This might be silly, but perhaps film your screen with a regular camera, that way you have something to show to the Apple techs?

My main frustration is that despite that it is obvious a lot of people are suffering from these freezes there have been no acknowledgements about it. My MacPro at home is now almost constantly bootcamped (what a pity...) for this reason, doing all work on my MacBookPro, which works flawlessly with 10.8.2.

Hey guys.

I saw on the Mac App Store an update that says
"MacBook Air and MacBook Pro Update 2.0
About MacBook Air and MacBook Pro Update 2.0

This update includes graphics performance and reliability enhancements and improves compatibility with some USB devices.

This update is recommended for all Mac notebooks introduced in June 2012."

Maybe this is the final answer for all the questions? I will be updating right now in a few moments.