MacBook Pro :: Random And Frequent 10.6.2 Freezes Or Spinning Wheels Of Hell
Dec 13, 2009
For a few days now, my 13" MBP (purchased in August; painfully clean-install upgraded to Snow Leopard in October) has been freezing into spinning wheel mode randomly every few minutes. It would seem that this happens particularly often in web browsers (but also when no browsers are operating and I'm typing away in Text Edit or chatting in Adium and Skype). When the browsers are on, the FlashPlayer would occasionally crash. No matter what app froze first, whatever else I click on also freezes.
The freezes happen most frequently after the computer has been to sleep and woken up by opening the lid. The wheels go spinning for up to two minutes, and then everything goes back to normal (for up to 3 mins before freezing again). The longer the comp operates after that, the rarer they become, and after a few hours they rarely happen at all (then again, some times they do anyway). On some occasions, everything freezes so badly I need to hard-reset, and then it takes the comp upwards of 15 minutes to reboot - and then everything keeps freezing, of course. Contrary to other reports of similar problems here, no CPU jumps appear to be happening during the freeze. I tried:
- Running Disk Utility after booting from Snow Leopard . Some permissions (which in forums here were referred to as inconsequential / not related to freezes) were repaired; HD in general "seems to be ok."
- Running RAM tests (with Rember, supposedly updated to Snow Leopard). Everything seemed fine
- Getting rid of the ARD agent (which was related to some of the permissions mentioned earlier)
- Stopping Bluetooth (as someone here with a similar problem thought it helped)
- Installing the Beta Adobe Flash Reader (same as above)
Nothing helped. I really don't want to take it to the lab; I live in Israel and the comp was purchased in the States, which means that the only licensed lab here reserves the right to keep the comp for up to 26 working days
I have a 1.8Ghz dual processor G5, 1GB Ram, 80GB HDD, with OS X 10.4.7 installed and all current updates, and today I was working on it and the fans on it slowly started speeding up, and then everything on the screen disappeared and a mesage appeared stating that a restart was required. After restarting everything seems to be working fine, but I'd like to know if this is a fluke or if I have a serious problem.
I've been noticing that my early 2008 quad mac pro has been having more frequent kernal panics and is pretty random.I've also noticed that my video card fan(ATI Radeon HD 2600) has been reving up and down and has been more noticeable.Could this be related? Do I need a better card?
I spend more time looking at that spinning color wheel than I do using my iMac. what I can do to clean things up so it's not lagging. I've run my disk utility, and it came out fine.
I have an older iMac, 2006 white version, running leopard. I am one of the many people who experience semi-frequent freezes which forces me to manually power the machine down. After much research it seems everyone has diagnosed the problem has hardware, specifically the graphics card running hot. I installed smcFancontrol and have ran it for four to five months. Since then I have experienced maybe 4 or 5 freezes, but the freeze occurs while doing nothing "heavy", just browsing in safari or chrome. Has there been any updated or new information concerning this problem? I have scanned the web a little and can't really find anything really recent. The most recent article/discussion i have found is roughly a year old.
Ive been getting this issue on my macbook quite frequently now; dont think its hardware related and occurs randomly at any time up to 3 times a day where the computer will slowly begin to freeze.
It (usually) begins by my browser not being able to access a website (just a white screen in browser section), at this point im able to alt tab between apps for some time but eventually everything will hard freeze, same with the cursor which will turn into a rainbow wheel and also eventually freeze.
Can only resolve this by power button for 6 secs (good thing it starts up in 5 seconds)
Since the last itunes update (May be a co incidence) , my 27" Mac keeps crashing with a white screen and flickering It then wont restart most times, even when using boot up options such as option, Cmd P+R. even removing power!waiting and restarting etc on most restarts wont work its a white screen.
Info: iMac (27-inch Mid 2011), OS X Mavericks (10.9.4)
Quite a while back, I switched from Firefox back to Safari, because Firefox was driving me crazy with it's intermittent freezes and whatnot. Safari was so much faster and allowed tabbing to menu form fields (which I think Firefox still does not do). But lately, it seems like Safari just slogs through everything it tries to do. Google maps is painful. Loading up the CBS website earlier took over a minute, and not because of a slow connection.
The spinning beachball now appears on every click it seems. This is was Safari 3, so I updated to Safari 4 beta, and it doesn't seem much better. It's odd because it didn't used to be like this...It just sort of started out of nowhere. One thing I do notice is that my hard drive is just churning away with activity at these times. Any ideas what could cause such random slowdowns? Restarting does not help. It's just as slow afterward.
What does it mean when my 13" Macbook Pro pointer turns into a spinning color wheel after a web page loads, but freezes while this is happening? Every now and it does this for just a few seconds. At first I though maybe it lost my home Wifi signal, but it's showing 4 full bars.
My MacBook pro freezes at start up at the gray screen with spinning gear. I did a firmware update yesterday and this happened upon restart. MacBook pro purchased new early 2011 lion
My 2010 Leopard MacBook Pro freezes for no apparent reason. The multicoloured spining wheel thingy pops up and I can move it but can't do anything else. It last for a few minutes and then it starts again.
In the last week or so i have been experiencing lock ups every 15-20 minutes, which last for around a minute. The problem has only presented itself after I moved to a dual monitor configuration, although this may be coincidental, given the nature of the problem. The problem only seems to occur when the system is reading from from the main hard disk however testing the disk (and performing a directory/file test) says that the disk (and all others in the system) are functioning properly.
Curiously, any audio playing at the time, regardless of the application it originates from, continues to play while the rest of the system is unresponsive. It also appears as if the keyboard and mouse are disconnected during this time, and the power lights on each begin to flash, and the Caps lock key no longer lights up. I would like to avoid replacing the system disk if at all possible, as i have already had to do this three times since last December, when i purchased the system, due to drives developing faults.
The issue I'm having is very weird taking into consideration that I just upgraded my hardware two months ago. I have an Intel X-25M SSD as my boot drive for OSX and a 1.5TB WD HDD with my Home Folder on it. Whenever, I launch an app it never launches immediately. I get a beachball that lasts about 5 seconds. When I try shutting down the computer I have to hit shutdown about 3-4 times before it does. Otherwise, it warns me with a message thats something like this: System cannot logout of user account because Safari is still in use. (but it's closed). Launching an app from an ssd should be instantaneous. So I don't understand if it is a hardware or software issue. I reset the PRAM ... helped for about a day but I'm back to the slowdowns. Any ideas. Also when I performed a software update for iTunes, the update installed but I got this warning so I have a feeling something is wrong.
My Macbook with 4 gb RAM won't boot standard, safe, or Recovery.. All three results in grey screen with apple logo and spinning wheel which freezes after a few minutes. It also won't boot a bootable Mavericks usb with install package. I can boot single user mode and also view whats going on in verbose.. I am including a photo of where the script stops. PS: I've already tried resetting PRAM and the SMC has been reset as well.
Since I use Snow Leopard I get randomly (around 1 to 10 ) freezes. When I get it I can click some applications but can't make changes in it. The beachball keeps spinning for some seconds and after the wait I can just continue working. I first thought it was Firefox, because it almost everytime happens when I am browsing the web, but I get the same with Safari.
It's getting verry annoying now :-(
I already checked: - Repair disk - Repair disk permissions - Run Apple diagnostics
Repairs my 1.5 year old mbp already had: - 2x keyboard - Topcase - Logicboard - Superdrive
I am getting random multiple freezes of programs and finder 10.6.8 imac11,1, 2.66 intel core i5, 27inch requiring a restart. Doesn't seem to matter what the programs are running and sometimes can't get a program to completely quit with force quit.
My girlfriend has a 17" G4 Powerbook - she recently bought it second hand. It's one of the late models, with a 1.67 GHz processor and 2GB of RAM installed. It runs like a dream, except for one thing - it has a propensity to freeze occasionally. They're not kernel panics - they're hard freezes, where everything locks up completely. Can't move the mouse, can't force quit, nothing - the only thing to do is switch off and on again. I've looked through the logs and can't find any crash reports, so I'm at a loss to what's causing this. The only lead I have is that it only seems to happen when the machine's running on battery - it's never frozen when the power cord's plugged in. I thought it might be overheating, but it froze this morning after only 5 mins of use, so now I'm stumped.
The last 2 days my iMac has completely frozen on me at random times. Frozen meaning, no mouse movement, no keyboard activity (caps lock not responding) and no OSX activity whatsoever. Temp at the time 41C, CPU Usage at 21% or smth, Fan speed at around 1200rpm. However, I don't get the infamous kernel panic error. I haven't changed anything hardware wise. I did have a couple of months ago the graphics glitch problem. Last software update was the iWork one. iMac is Aluminum 20' with C2D 2.4 and ATi 2600 Pro.
I have 512 mb of RAM on my ibook G4. Lately something is eating it up. I looked on the Activity Monitor and couldn't see anything different. Now when I open more than one page on a website, the RAM goes down to about 29 mb. and then the site freezes with the little rainbow pinwheel spinning. I can't get it to stop with the Apple/period technique.
Also, I have over 3 gigs of virtual memory but it's looks like it's not being tapped into so that I don't run out of RAM.
When I have documents open and I walk away for a few minutes, when I come back and resume working, my computer freezes up and the little pinwheel starts spinning. I literally have to unplug it to get out of this frozen state. This has been getting progressively worse over the past three months. They told me to add more memory, which I did. However, the problem persists. Do you know why my computer would freeze up after the screen has had no activity for just a few minutes? My screen saver is set for an hour so I know this is not the problem.
My intel mini (2008, I think) won't boot. I ran Disk Utility and then Disk Warrior from my Macbook Pro, then I tried single-user mode. Everything came back "OK" but it still won't boot. It gets to the Apple logo with the spinning gear, spins 1-2 times, then freezes. It just sits, frozen, until I hold the power button and force it to turn off.
It started only recently. I don't have any new software installation. I was trying to upload my resume to dice. I clicked on the choose file and boom! The finder window came up and the so did the spinning ball. I force quit safari - everytime.
i have an ibook g4, and was using it just fine the other night, then when i came back to it a few minutes later it had shut off completely. now when i boot up, the computer freezes at the spinning gear startup screen or at the blank blue screen immediately after the spinning gear. it will boot in single user mode, but it won't boot up with my os x install disc. does anyone know any unix i could try to use to get my mac up and running again, or has anyone had this same problem and knows a fix for it?
I'm new here to this forum and I'd like to get some advice. I've had my 2008 macbook 2.4ghz-160gb since august of last year. I upgraded it to 4gb of ram in the early stages and had no issues till lately.
For the last week, almost daily, Id get the beachball for a long period of time. This happens most frequently when I surf the internet. Occasionally this may occur when i play music in itunes but that is probably due to my library being store on an external hd. With that being said though, as I mentioned, it most likely occurs when I surf the internet. Many times, its not just a browser crash but a system wide crash where my mouse can move but when i click anything in the background, it would have no effect (but my mouse can move still). Only way to 'resolve' this was to do a hard shutdown and restart by holding the power button for few seconds. Of course, this issue keeps happening and it pissed me off so I looked around the net to find some possible solutions and many sites claimed flash being an issue. I uninstalled flash and retested and the problem still occurred. Reading maclife, it mentioned about some fsck -fy thing during boot up so i ran that test and found no errors. Restarted again, did some surfing and still the problem.
