MacBook Freezing at random?
Asked by
justn (
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)
March 25th, 2009
My MacBook is seemingly freezing at random. Specs are 2GB RAM 2.2Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo running 10.5.6. The apps running when it last happened were Mail, Firefox, Vienna, iTunes, Transmission, and Stickies. Also running in the menubar were Drop Box, Skitch, BowTie, TextExpander, Twitterific, Jumpcut, Caffeine and iStat Menus. When I pasted a large chunk of text into the Translation widget my MacBook just froze.
Earlier today it froze at the screensaver with the same apps running.
The other day it froze when I was editing a document in TextEdit, then the only running apps were TextEdit along with Stickies and my menubar apps.
This all seems quite odd to me because I have recently re-installed Leopard. Does anyone have any idea what may be going on?
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15 Answers
Is it giving you a kernel panic? Or are you able to switch to other applications?
When it “freezes,” do you have to turn it off, or can you force-quit applications? if you can pull up the Force Quit menu or check the Dock, are any apps listed as “Not Responding”?
A couple of things to try (although random freezes are a hard problem to fix!)
Open Disk Utility and run Repair Permissions.
– Restart the Mac and hold down the apple key and the letter S.
When you get a screen full of black text, type “fsck -y -f” and press return.
If you get any messages stating that disk errors were found and fixed, rerun this until you don’t get any more errors.
– If the freezes continue, try creating a new user account. If you don’t have any freezing problems under the new account, the problem is likely a preference file in your old account.
The upgrade to Leopard may have been more than your memory could take. Look into it, it may need to be cleared out a bit or your RAM upgraded to keep it running the way it should.
@johnpowell Its not a Kernel Panic, and I am able to click on other applications, but then those hang and give me the “pin wheel of doom.”
@crisw I’ve repaired permissions. I’ll have to try the file system check after school today. If that doesn’t work I’ll try a new user account. Thanks.
@adreamofautumn
2 G on a MacBook should have no trouble running Leopard. We do it routinely.
@crisw just because the computer has 2 G doesn’t mean it has 2 G available. When I upgraded to leopard I had to deal with it not having enough available memory to run the OS as it should. Once I dealt with that everything ran smoothly.
@crisw brought it to apple, was told there wasn’t enough available RAM, emptied out some of the extraneous stuff on my computer onto an external hard drive bought another 1 G of RAM. Ran beautifully from there on out.
I can’t in any way say that that is the problem or that it’ll fix it. It was just a thought. :/
@adreamofautumn
This seems to be confusing RAM and hard drive space. They are two very different things. Unless your HD is very full, it doesn’t affect RAM.
shrugs i’m not a Mac Genius, I hand it over to them, listen to what they say and then let them fix it until I get it back. Sorry i’m not more useful with an answer. :/. I know my hard drive was pretty full though. It had slowed down to a snail crawl at one point. Again though, i’m not a Mac Genius.
I seem to encounter a lot of people thinking RAM and HD space are both called “Memory” and can be used interchangeably.
…huh
Have you determined which app is freezing?
When it freezes… press command + option + escape and see if there’s an obvious culprit.
Download Quicksilver so that if finder hangs you can still launch activity monitor and see if you can see whats doing it.
SystemUIServer-(or something similar) is your menu bar…If that is not responding then its one of your many menu bar apps
Check for updates on everything
Did you ever go from Tiger to Leopard-or a fresh install of leopard?
I’ve heard of many people having problems doing the upgrade route….
iStatpro is a useful troubleshooting tool.
keep us updated!
@patg7590
Yes, a lot of people seem to get RAM and HD space confused a lot.
One app will freeze causing the rest of my computer to freeze. Its been a different app every time.
When it freezes cmd + opt +esc doesn’t work, and the last time I tried to figure out what had crashed, Activity monitory wouldn’t open (or any other app).
My current MacBook came with Leopard pre-installed. On my old MacBook I had Tiger and did a fresh install of Leopard when it came out. However, I did use Migration Assistant to move all my data, apps, and preferences to Leopard. Could that be causing a problem?
@patg7590
Yes, that could be a problem- you may have something non-Leopard compatible running in the background. I’d try checking Activity Monitor when your computer is acting OK, noting all the user processes running and tracking down what they are. Ferret out the ones that belong to apps you don’t need and keep them from starting up. Then if you still have the problem you can turn them all off, then turn the apps back on one by one until you find the problematic one.
I don’t think anyone has mentioned this yet:
is it overheating?
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