MacBook Air (2013) freezing

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gss57 Author

Level 1

4 points

MacBook Air (2013) freezing

My sister has been reporting freezing issues on her 2013 MacBook Air recently. Some details in case they are relevant:

- Latest updates on all software, including Safari (8.0.6) and Yosemite (10.10.3)

- 1.3 GHz Core i5 (Haswell)

- 4 GB RAM

- 128 GB flash storage

After using her computer, here are some problems that I observed.

When using Pages, one is able to type a little bit, but the application quickly freezes. If it does "un-freeze," the problem recurs soon after you start typing again. For whatever it's worth, after observing several of these "freeze"-"unfreeze" repetitions, I noticed that this issue does not seem related to auto-saving, because the " - edited" sign at the top of the window remains even after the application un-freezes.
When using Safari, you may be able to briefly go to a Website or open up preferences, but basically, soon after opening Safari, it freezes as well. You end up with the rotating beach ball and you need to force quit the application.
When using Chrome for Mac, the application works okay but the program does not quit properly. If you quit via the normal means (for example, cmd-Q or going to File → Quit), the program does not fully quit as it normally would. The dot indicating an active application still remains under Chrome in the dock. In order to fully quit Chrome, you have to force quit it.

She was previously able to use all of these applications just fine, and only has been reporting these problems to me in the last few days. I am stumped, since all of the basic fixes I've tried (clearing caches, restarting the computer, checking memory usage) have not solved the problem or yielded further clues. The remaining possibility that occurred to me was that it was a bug in the latest version of Yosemite, but the fact that she had 10.10.3 for a while before anything happened appears to counteract that argument.

Does someone have a better idea of what might be causing these problems or how to fix them?

MacBook Air, OS X Yosemite (10.10.3)

Posted on Jun 2, 2015 5:43 PM

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Answer 1

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,547 points

Jun 2, 2015 6:09 PM in response to gss57

When you see a beachball cursor or the system is unresponsive, note the exact time: hour, minute, second.

These instructions must be carried out as an administrator. If you have only one user account, you are the 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 and start typing the name.

The title of the Console window should be All Messages. If it isn't, select

SYSTEM LOG QUERIES ▹ All Messages

from the log list on the left. If you don't see that list, select

View ▹ Show Log List

from the menu bar at the top of the screen.

Each message in the log begins with the date and time when it was entered. Scroll back to the time you noted above.

Select the messages entered from then until the end of the episode, or until they start to repeat, whichever comes first.

Copy the messages to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Paste into a reply to this message by pressing command-V.

The log contains a vast amount of information, almost all of it useless for solving any particular problem. When posting a log extract, be selective. A few dozen lines are almost always more than enough.

Please don't indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.

Please don't post screenshots of log messages—post the text.

Some private information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.

When you post the log extract, you might see an error message on the web page: "You have included content in your post that is not permitted," or "The message contains invalid characters." That's a bug in the forum software. Please post the text on Pastebin, then post a link here to the page you created.

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