why does my macbook pro keep freezing up and how do I resolve it

What exactly happens when it freezes, and how do you recover?

If you have more than one user account, these instructions must be carried out as an administrator.

Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:

☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)

☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.

☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Console in the page that opens.

Step 1

Make sure the title of the Console window is All Messages. If it isn't, select All Messages from the SYSTEM LOG QUERIES menu on the left.

Enter "BOOT_TIME" (without the quotes) in the search box. Note the timestamps of those log messages, which refer to the times when the system was booted. Now clear the search box and scroll back in the log to the last boot time when you had the problem. Post the messages logged before the boot, while the system was unresponsive or was failing to shut down. Please include the BOOT_TIME message at the end of the log extract.

Post the log text, please, not a screenshot. If there are runs of repeated messages, post only one example of each. Don’t post many repetitions of the same message. Do not post thousands of lines from the log. In most cases, a few dozen lines are more than enough.

Important: Some private information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Edit it out by search-and-replace in a text editor before posting.

Step 2

Still in Console, look under System Diagnostic Reports for crash or panic logs, and post the most recent one, if any. In the interest of privacy, I suggest you edit out the “Anonymous UUID,” a long string of letters, numbers, and dashes in the header of the report, if present (it may not be.) Please don’t post shutdownStall, spin, or hang logs — they're very long and not helpful.

Please review the instructions for step 1 and try again.

RT Linc,

I have the same issue. Always happens when iTunes is open. The log is below, there are thousands of these before the freeze. Seems like a Blackberry app, should I remove this? If so, how? I have not had a Blackberry for a long time.

2012-09-01 11:29:28.981 AM RimAlbumArtDaemon[220]: Failed to write artwork to folder, will try again directly from iTunes: /Users/laurencecooke/Library/Application Support/BlackBerryDesktop/MediaCache/AlbumArtCache/sat, aug 16, 2008/1_56_31

2012-09-01 11:29:28.982 AM RimAlbumArtDaemon[220]: Caching album art for downloaded tracks: 2102 candidates

There are two System Diagnostic reports, both related to Picasa, but these were a few weeks ago, before I upgraded from 10.8 to 10.8.1.

Any help would be much appreciated. I have to reboot about 5-10 times per day - like having a PC!