Screensavers in Mountain Lion Freezing 2012 MacBook Pro

I'm pretty sure it's the nvidia drivers on ML. This issue never happened on my AMD macbook pro and it happens often on my retina macbook pro and, from what I heard, older macs with Nvidia cards. I think it will only be solved when Apple updates the graphic drivers thru software update. 😟

yep, very annoying, however, if you have a laptop, close the screen to force 'sleep', then reopen, works every time

chiming in as some seem to think this is an nvidia issue. i have same problem ML 10.8.2 on a 2008 MP with ATI video card. This issue is totally something with ML. when i first started having the problem i went back to Lion and everything worked fine. last week i upgraded to ML again (hoping it was fixed with .2 update) but no still have the problem.

Am going to test the suggestion of unchecking 'sleep the harddrives' to see what happens.

There are lots of threads on this and is easily repro'ed hope the apple folks are looking in to this bug.

unchecking 'sleep the harddrives' from the power management cp appears to of fixed me. thanks.

I've had the same problem. Could not isolate it for a while. Every time my system went into screen saver, or a sleep mode, upon clicking the mouse to wake up, It would sometimes the spinning beach ball, or just the mouse pointer.

I had the drives put to sleep whenever possible in Energy Saver. I have since turned the drives off of "sleep" so they spin whenever.

Since doing this - there seems to be no more freezing. I have 4 internal drives and two external USB.

This is a Dual Quad Core Xeon Mac Pro. Freash install of 10.8.2 and fresh install of all apps on a brand new SATA 2TB drive.

Hope that helps. Turn OFF "Put hard disks to sleep whenever possible".

I am having the same problem. New Mac Mini 2.6 Quad i7 16gig ram 1TB HD.

Runs screen saver and photo library for a while then goes gaga.

L.

Turns out the power management work around with the disk drive did not fix me. My current work around is to not use a screen saver. Just let power mgmt shut my screen down. Have had no problems since doing this.

I am trying your solution. It is frustrating that I called apple support on the issue several times to no avail.

An update after a number of issues.

Come to find out that I have had to hard boot one to many times and damaged one of my new Seagate 2TB internal drives. For a long time it's been freezing. Tracking the issues in Console. Since pulling all my hair out, I have finally got a configuration that works for me. It may/may not other people.

After putting 1.08.2 on a "good" drive, I have the following configs:

System preferences:

Put hard disks to sleep whenever possible = UNCHECKED

Wake for Ethernet network Access = UNCHECKED

Allow power button... = UNCHECKED

Start up automaticallly after... = UNCHECKED

Computer Sleep = NEVER

Screensaver Start After = NEVER

I have my dual ASUS LCD display set up to a separate power strip from the computer and other peripherals. So - when not in use - I turn off the powerstrip and vice versa. So the Mac sees them as on - but they are not powered. I need access to my Mac all the time when I am not in the office - so it's natural for me to leave it on all the time. I just don't have a lot of processes going on.

Whenever possible - I only mount the external USB drives whenever I need them. Since I have internal bays - I use one of the internals for a back-up.

I've not had any crashes or freezes since. On a rare occasion - I put to sleep - but only if the USB drives are disconnected. I notice that if they are on - when in sleep of soemthing - it usally causes a wake issue.

Note- I have friends with other Mac systems, and they don't seem to have the smae problem.

Having a similar problem - only mine is that I can't access Screen Saver under 'Desktop/Screen Saver' in prefs. The whole system hangs up and causes me to have to hard reboot. Have tried everything - replacing everything in Library to do with com.apple.screensaver I can find, and nothing has worked. (I even tried copying the .plists from an older UID without the problem, to no avail.)

Guess I'll try the advice here, and just let Sleep put it down. I really don't care much about a screen saver anyway...