Having Problems with my Mac Book Pro 13" (mid 2009)

Question

Having Problems with my Mac Book Pro 13" (mid 2009)

My problems started when I was in college. At first I thought it was a hard drive issue but the Genius people said it was a probably a wifi connection error.

These are my problems:

1. Will be browsing websites and then safari will give me a message that says "Cannot establish secure connection to network" or something like that.

2. App store will say "cannot establish a secure netowork connection"

3. Google chrome just won't work and it'll crash sometimes.

4. Cannot save documents on Pages.

5. When I try throwing away something it will give me an error message.

It's a real pain in the butt because I'm a college student and I have a lot of work to do on the computer. Symptoms I described above will occur at random times. I've tried erasing hard drive and redownloading Mountain lion and the problems still persist.

It's really random and it's starting to upset me. As I mention before, I went to the Genius people at the Mac store and they did hardrive tests and everything and everything worked. They couldn't replicate my problem.

Is there something I can do to stop this???

Note:

I've used this compter since 2009. Everything worked until one day in college after I updated my itunes. My interenet connection started bugging out. I had problems restarting. I don't know. This problem is bugging me and I really don't want to get a new laptop because it's expensive and I'm a poor, broke college student.

MacBook Pro (13-inch Mid 2009)

Posted on Dec 20, 2012 4:47 PM

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Answer 1

macjack

Level 10

111,168 points

Dec 20, 2012 6:22 PM in response to fforeveryourstarr

If it's not your hard drive and it's not your system that leaves either your user account or your connection. But that wouldn't account for trash error messages.

Have you tried repairing your usser account by

Booting up holding command-r keys into your Recovery Volume.

From the menu bar choose Utilities then select Terminal.

At the prompt type resetpassword

Press return

The Password reset utility will launch (do not reset password)

Instead, click your Mac hard drive.

Then from the drop-down select the user account you want to repair. At the bottom of the window, you’ll see an area labeled ‘Reset Home Directory Permissions and ACLs’. Click the Reset button there.

The process takes a couple of minutes. When it’s done, quit the programs you’ve opened and restart your Mac.

If it's not that then you need to go to System Preferences > Users & Groups and remove your Login Items and test. I know the problem is that it's intermittent but you'll need to run w/o them for a while or in a fresh test account to see.

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Answer 2

Dec 20, 2012 8:02 PM in response to macjack

I did what you suggested for the repair stuff. It worked great for like 2 hours then I started experiencing the same problems. Could you please elaborate more on the 2nd part you mentioned? Removing passwords?

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Answer 3

macjack

Level 10

111,168 points

Dec 20, 2012 8:30 PM in response to fforeveryourstarr

The normal way to test for problems in your user would be to boot into

Safe Mode and see if the problem still occurs?

Restart holding the "shift" key.

(Expect it to take longer to start this way because it runs a directory check first.)

If this works look in System Preferences > Users & Groups > Login items and delete any third party login items (-), you can always add them back with the (+). Also look in /Library/Startup Items. Nothing is put in that folder by default, so anything in there is yours.

The reason I didn't suggest this is that you said the issues were "random" and could take some time to appear. Also there are some items that won't work in Safe Mode which may or may not get in your way in normal workflow. These are listed under "some items don't work in Safe Mode" in the link I gave you.

If you think you can work that way long enough to tell, then give it a shot.

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