OS X :: Unstable (system Freeze) - Must Power Cycle Too Often
May 30, 2009
my name is David Francis and I publish a community magazine in Bowling Green KY. I consider myself fairly adept with computers and technology having been working with them since 1987. I was a full time web developer for 10 years prior to starting a magazine company in 2007. My experience (was) Microsoft (can I say that here?) and PC. I developed ASP websites using SQL databases and I was more or less a MS Partner having invested many years on the PC and the MS Software (lots of money too I should say.) I was "persuaded" to learn the Macintosh by a fellow publisher and friend who loaned me a computer and Adobe software for six months. I must say I reluctant, but realized quickly that I needed the tools and performance of the MAC.
I purchased a brand new MAC Pro in Nov 07 (2 x 2.66GHz Dual Core), this was the same month that Leopard came out and it was included with the new machine. It came with 2gb of ram which I upgrade (MAC certified ram) to 4bg about six months ago.)I immediately installed Adobe Creative Suite CS3 which I purchased as well as Office for MAC, Parallels so I could run Windows (sorry), and a logitech mouse and keyboard............................
I picked up an 802.11n Airport Express card for my Mac Pro last week. The installation went fine, but my Netgear router was only 802.11g. So I felt the need to get an Airport Express now that it?s been updated to ?n?. First I plugged the AE into my switch along with my networked printer, cable modem, and Tivo. My 1st gen MacBook showed me full bars and was very happy. My Mac Pro only showed 2 bars. They are side-by-side and about 20 feet from the AE. Strange. I plugged the AE into an extension cord and moved it closer to the Mac Pro. Still, after the AE completes its POST, I get full bars on the Mac Pro. As soon as I hop on the internet, it drops to 2 bars. It?s really weak and pages take forever to load. Sometimes not at all. The MacBook is still fine.
My wife being used to PC nightmares at work suggested that I reboot. ?Heresy?, I said. ?I shouldn?t have to do that. It should ?just work?.? From the Mac Pro, I turned Airport off and then on again. Full bars again. As soon as I hop on the internet, it drops. So what?s up? Much to my lament, I rebooted. Bingo! It works. Full bars, all the time. So I moved the AE back to where I initially had it. (About 5 feet away next to the cable modem and switch. One less extension cord to deal with.) The AE completed its POST, gave me a green LED and I went back to the Mac Pro. 2 bars again! ERRRR!.............
Is it true that when we charged 100% battery and it says on AC power, does it LITERALLY do what it say? i mean the power of Macbook pro is not provided by battery but by magsafe instead. is it?last thing, leaving the Macbook connected to the working magsafe isn't add numbers up to cycle count right? and is it okay to charge the Macbook pro all the time and only using it when we could't find AC power outlet?
I'm using my G5 for both personal use and work so it's on all the time. It has worked flawless with this same hardware config for almost 2 years, but for the past week or so I've had about 4 to 5 kernel panics or complete system freeze a day. This happens when doing web browsing, Final Cut Pro editing, playing a game etc, so basically I can't pinpoint it to a specific application, or to a piece of hardware I've added. I have ran REMBER to test my ram and all seems fine.
I just got the MacBook Pro three days ago. Before, m system preferences were working fine, now when I open it all i get it the spinning wheel. How can I stop this? Force Quit hasn't seemed to help.
My Mac stats: Mac G5 DT/1.8 GHz / OS 10.5.4 / 2.0 GB SDRAM with all current system downloads; I bought this Mac new from Mac connection approximately three years ago. The problems I've been experiencing for many months:
1. Seldom, but occasionally my Mac will fail to start up causing me to do a forced shutdown by holding in the power button. If I delay doing this for a while (a minute or two), the Mac fan comes on rather loud. After a minute or so after the forced shutdown, I try start up again and Mac starts up OK.
2. Seldom, but occasionally my Mac 'freezes'/cursor will not move, causing me do perform the forced shutdown as described above.
3. When I wake Mac from Sleep mode, there is a 'pop/snap' sound which is very audible depending on the volume setting I am using.
NOTE: In case I had any defective SDRAM modules, I replaced them with new high quality ram modules.
New Mac Mini 2009, Apps, user and settings imported from a G4 Cube running Leopard perfectly. When I go to System Prefs - Accounts - Guest and I mark the checkbox "Allow Guests connect to this computer" System Prefs freezes with rainbow pizza. Then, no matter if I kill the application or not, the system is death. If I launch new apps from the dock, they bounce a four five times and then stop but the applications don't launch. Not even I can restart. When all the applications closes the system starts a loop of spinning clock wheel - blue screen - clock wheel - blue screen forever. This is the second new Mac that has the same exact problem after importing all my data, and it's 100% reproducible. I returned the first one to Apple cause I thought it was a hardware failure. What I have done?
Repair permissions and diks Reinstall the system Create a test user and try from there Try from root user System log when I click the guest box: System log after checking Guest User Access:......................
heavily cycled battery began to reveal age when low battery warning stopped appearing. next the battery revealed age by displaying incorrect charge status percentages. finally, the system froze (pointer did not move) so battery was replaced. system freeze continues to plague the Apple iBook G4 with 1.33 GHz PowerPC CPU and 1.25 GB of RAM. how to correct or just recover data from user folders
I have 5 external drives... They are Seagate and Western Digital Drives. The worst of the bunch is the Western Digital My Book Studio Edition (1TB) that I have connected via FW800. The 2nd worst offender is the Seagate 750GB Free Agent connected via FW400. The most dependable appears to be a Western Digital USB drive, but it's the slowest performer. The issue is this: I either have a freeze up that requires an unplug from the Mac as well as power, then re-mount to get working again, OR, when I start up the Mac, it just hangs at the 'apple' and never fully boots. I have to unplug the drives and boot, then plug them back in after the boot. It's getting very frustrating. Do you all have a successful setup with external drives?
I have a MBP running Snow Leopard. The keyboard and trackpad became unresponsive, even though music was still streaming through Google Chrome. So I held down the power button to force shutdown. When something like this occurs, is there anything that should be done upon restarting the system again? Any general maintenance, system checks, etc? From my experience with Windows, not infrequently after similar scenarios, forced shutdown or crash, upon restart it'll automatically go into some type of disc scan. I wonder if anything similar occurs or is necessary with OSX. And lastly, when the system freezes like in my instance, if that's considered a freeze even though music was streaming all the while, is holding down the power button the only resolution? Are there no other safer alternatives to attempt first?
My iMac has been running very very slowly for about 2 weeks. I am talking very very slowly. It seems to be processing time. I will be in word, move the cursor and it will take a few seconds to get there. Sometimes I have to wait a minute after I click on something for the cursor to catch up, and (hate to say it) even 2 minutes. That's like a millennium in Mac time.
I am having very frequent system freezes (multiple per day) then when restart the restart is very slow. Activity Monitor shows TechToolsupportDaemon taking up 99-120% of CPU for extended periods. I have a MacBook Pro 15-iInch, Early 2011, with 2.3 GHz Intel Core i7; 8 GB 1333MHz DDR3; Intel HD Graphics 3000 512 MB; running OS X 10.9.3 (13D65).
I am also having episodes for sudden abnormal graphics with jagged lines, Screen split vertically with multiple horizontal lines. Screen becomes totally unreadable. Then sudden total screen freeze.
I made rescue system drives on flash drive when I first shifted to Maverick, so I could use Disk Utility to Verify and/or repair the main disk. When I upgraded to the next edition of Maverick, my flash drives no longer worked. I tried to upgrade the flash drives to the new system, but there was not enough room. I tried erasing the drives but now I have a flash drive with only a small amount of space, the rest is hidden and locked.
What do I need to do to correct the problem of frequent freezes, and then How can I free space on my flash drives?
I've seen so many posts about this, but with the limited time I have between system freezes, in desperation I come here. I'm running Leopard 10.5.8 on desktop IMac. I have plenty of memory, but don't know how to check the hard disk space (I'm an ubernoob). I've run a couple of the mac maintenance programs still to no avail. I get intermittent SBBOD where NOTHING responds and have to do a hard reboot. Doesn't matter what applications are up, as even startup is very slow when in SBBOD mode. Rebooting, then, doesn't resolve the issue. It runs fine when the SBBOD is not present.
I have a 24" Mid-2007 iMac, with 4GB of ram. I'm trying to setup Boot Camp with either XP or Vista so I can run some CAD software (Solidworks) for a class I'm taking. I installed XP SP3 using media that had SP3 pre-applied, and installed the Boot Camp drivers that came with my computer, then downloaded the Boot Camp 2.1 update. However, applications frequently crash - windows update fails randomly, the solidworks installer crashed, internet explorer crashes, etc. I then decided to try out Vista - formatted the partition, started from scratch, same deal. Ran the Boot Camp driver DVD, applied the Vista Boot Camp 2.1 update, then the crashed begin. Windows Update failed about halfway through the updates, internet explorer crashes, didn't even bother installed Solidworks.
What is going on? I have absolutely no problems in OS X, and I've never encountered anything like this in XP or Vista before on other computers. Jokes aside, a fresh install typically works for a while. It makes me think its a hardware issue - but what hardware failure would only manifest itself in windows?
My bro is having one heck of a time with RAM upgrades. First he popped in two Kingston 2 GB sticks and thought all was well. His MBP 2.26 was fine for a few hrs until when he tried to restart and he got the 'gray screen of death' where nothing happened. just clocking, no apple logo. So we removed the RAM and put in the stock 2 GB. Started up fine. Put the Kingston back in. Would not start. Ok prob solved. Then he just got OWC RAM and put in 2 sticks. Ran fine for the night but he called me over late last night and he is getting the SBBOD when trying to open Photoshop, iMovie, and iTunes. I had to hold the power button down to get out. Definitly not normal. Restarted and it was fine. It shows 4 GB RAM...but again the machine locks up and we have to do a force shut off. So I just said pull that stuff out and let's look at this more closely. Maybe the sticks were not seated right or whatever. Inspected and everything looked fine. His friend was so fed up he ran and got his MBP 13 and opened it up (he has stock 4 GB) and put it in his machine. His MBP booted up fine and we played with it for about 1.5hrs and did not crash. He had photoshop and iMovie up at the same time running and the thing was working very good. With the 2 GB he said it lagged a lot.
So we're not sure. I told him to return the OWC and buy Crucial but now he's all up and arms saying "I'm just gonna waste my money and buy Apple RAM at the Apple Store and be done with this crap!!!!" he was pretty frustrated as he needs to get going on some work projects I guess and he now doesn't care if its gonna cost him $200. He says its peace of mind. Well not peace of mind for your wallet! thoughts? just a fluke? OWC I've heard a lot of good things but I've never used the stuff. I normally used Crucial. Isn't Apple RAM the same thing anyway?! his $... just think its weird that his machine didn't like 2 brands of RAM, kinda made me think its the machine...
I just purchased my macbook pro 13inch (mid 2014) from a IT fair, 2 days ago and charged it ONCE to 100%. However, today when i checked my charge cycle, it reflects 3. Is this normal?
My wi-fi signal keeps failing in the house, but the fixed connection is stable. This might well be a stoopid question, but can too many wi-fi devices cause a router to go unstable? In the house we have four macs, two iPhones and three airport expresses. The router is the standard one that comes with O2 broadband in the UK and has been pretty reliable until the last couple of weeks
I have had such instability issues with Firefox lately that I have temporarily switched to Safari. I started noticing this on 1.5, but has only gotten worse on 3.5, including 3.5.2. Here is a list of observations:
1. On my Mac, if Firefox is idle for a good time, say a number of hours, it tends to become very sluggish, sometimes even locking up.
2. I used to sleep my system overnight, and 90% of the mornings, Firefox would be locked up.
3. About 50% of the time after sleeping the system overnight, my whole system would be locked up. If not locked up, then the whole system would be very sluggish until I force quit Firefox.
4. I temporarily solved all of these "sleep-overnight" issues by making sure Firefox was shut down before sleeping the system. After doing this, the system just wakes up immediately and works well, like it did some time ago, before the Firefox issues.
5. My son using Vista is reporting the same set of things, in that Firefox locks up itself, and it locks up his whole system, requiring a system reboot. So similar, but worse (yeah, Windows, I know).
This is my second time around re-installing snow leopard - clean. Why is it so slow? The spinning wheel comes up all the time, even for mundane tasks such as minimizing a window where I have to wait 10 or 15 seconds at a time. This time around I installed all the latest updates and iLife '09 - but its still as slow as ever. I also downloaded latest version of firefox.
I uses a late 2009 Macbook Pro 2.53ghz 15 inch, and previous OSX flies on this machine. I'd like to go back to OSX Leopard but I can't cause I need the latest version of iPhone SDK which only runs on snow leopard. What's going on here Apple? Your OS is unstable and slow, and there's no acknowledgement from your site whatsoever!!
My G4 MDD Dual 1.25 has become a little unstable in the last few days, applications keep hanging, or just refuse to start (not responding message seen if I force quit) and it?s now a bit temperamental about shutting down or seeing flashcards. Now the only thing I done in recent days is install a Firmtek SeriTek/1S2 SATA controller, could this be the cause of this?
One happy side effect of the .3 upgrade is that toast now works with my HL-DT-ST DVDRW GA11N:drive. No unstable connection message, no coasters.. it's a miracle :-)
Since switching to Lion, the screen image on our iMac has become VERY unstable. It frequently flickers to the right and even moves completely to the right and disappears. It also zooms in unexpectedly and cannot be restored to normal view without backing up a screen. Another annoying feature is that while the screen flickers and twitches, one cannot access hot fields to enter data or select pull down menus.
My macbook pro is connected to the internet via WiFi router, and it very often it happens that my macbook loses connectivity with it. WiFi logo shows the same signal strength, but all browsers (Safari & Chrome) can't load webpages.
This issue can be solved by turning WiFi on and off, but it happens again and again. It looks like connectivity loses when Macbook goes in sleep mode and get's back from it, but sometimes connectivity issues happen even without sleep mode switching. I found in the internet that this issue can be solved by turning off Bluetooth.
I just got my battery replaced and after a full charge both istat and mac osx shows that there is only one cycle available. I remember that my previous battery used to have at least 60 cycles. Is 1 cycle normal for new batteries or?
Sometimes when I try to turn on my power mac G5 don't work. I have already changed the inside battery and also trying to reset the pmu. The only thing that works always is to disconnect the power cord from the back some minutes.
Information: G5 Mac OS X (10.5.1) PowerPC G5 (2.2)
I've kept a PPC with system 7.5.1 around for reference to prior financial records.Now chose to wipe it clean, along with 3 external HDs.
Erased internal disc, then erased three external discs.
Maybe that is enough, but I recall that if financial and personal data is on a drive, the only way to insure it is not accessible is to overwrite the drive.
How can that be done with 7.5.1???
What I did do is use Silver Lining to also erase the HD and THEN set a password to both start and open the drives. Will that suffice? or what??
