Comments on: MacBook Pro Freezing Issues with OS X Leopard?

By: hala naanouh

hala naanouh — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 11:52:24 +0000

I purchased a macbook pro 3 month ago and i am so disappointed and so frustrated that i am going to sell it and get a pc. people say pc;s get virus, well i have had an hp on my desk for 5 years and never caused me a single problem. this apple is TERRIBLE, TERRIBLE TERRIBLE and everytime i use it i am in tears. it freezes and goes into the loading mode and stay int he loading mode until i restart it or shhut it downi am always afraid to do a transaction on it because i am afraid it will freezes and will not be done on time. it is a disater i took it twice to the Apple store and called technical support 5 times and NO ONE could figure out what the hell is wrong with this beast. Now I bought it at bestbuy and it is under warranty. should i demand a refund? what does warranty means

By: Mark W

Mark W — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 23:00:56 +0000

I have had the wake-up problem since my mbp 17″ was new, and the keyboard has a slow S. But now I have decided that after 20 years of Macs, I will look at a pc. The final straw was when this $3000 computer locks up for no apparent reason. Blue and grey strips covers the screen and you have to hard reboot with the battery and power removed. This doesnt always work either so you have to do it many times in combination with resetting the pram. Eventually you can get it past the apple and boot up but it may happen again in just few minutes or a few hours. Apple has apparently lost control of their quality control and I cannot find anything helpful on their web site. $1500 per year is just too much to pay for a computer no matter how nice the 17″ HD screen looks.

By: jrmora71

jrmora71 — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 17:06:39 +0000

MACBOOK PRO FREEZES UPON SLEEPING: probably too much RAM is being saved to the hard drive upon sleeping. Read below and good luck!

I had the same freezing problems after closing the lid and going to sleep mode in my maxed up MacBook Pro (17″ 2.93GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 8GB 1067 MHz DDR3 RAM, 250GB OCZ Vertex SSD). Very annoying! Nonetheless, after googling a lot, I apparently solved this proble by changing the sleeping mode modality from “3” (default in the newest machines) to “0” (older modality).

Here is a more detailed explanation:

After you launch Terminal, the first step is to determine which sleep mode your Mac is currently using (in case you wish to go back to it). You can both view and change the sleep mode using the Unix program pmset. To see your current settings, type pmset -g | grep hibernatemode. You should see something like this:

pmset -g | grep hibernatemode hibernatemode 3

Great, so your machine is using mode 3, whatever that might be. Well, thanks to the documentation for the handy Deep Sleep Dashboard widget, which puts your machine immediately into hibernation mode (so you don’t have to yank all the power sources to invoke it), we can tell exactly which mode is which:

0 – Old style sleep mode, with RAM powered on while sleeping, safe sleep disabled, and super-fast wake.
1 – Hibernation mode, with RAM contents written to disk, system totally shut down while “sleeping,” and slower wake up, due to reading the contents of RAM off the hard drive.
3 – The default mode on machines introduced since about fall 2005. RAM is powered on while sleeping, but RAM contents are also written to disk before sleeping. In the event of total power loss, the system enters hibernation mode automatically.

To change your sleep mode, you use pmset again, providing the variable and value you wish to assign. So to return to the old style sleep mode (which is mode 0 from the above list), enter this command:

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0

Press Return, and you’ll be asked for your password. Provide it, and your sleep mode has been changed. Note that restarting is not required for these changes to take effect.

Recover some drive space
If your machine was previously set to mode 3 (or 7 ) and you’ve reverted to the old style sleep mode, you’ve got one more step to take: recover the drive space used up by the copy of your system’s RAM, which was created the last time you slept the machine prior to making the switch. In Terminal, enter these two commands, pressing Return after each and providing your password when asked (in my case it didn’t ask for my password again after changing the sleep mode)

cd /var/vm
sudo rm sleepimage

In my case it released almost 8GB of disc space. I guess it will closely amount the amount of RAM your system has. Ironically, by trying to make a “super system” by paying $2,000 for 8GB RAM plus the SSD drive, it might have been to much RAM to copy and recover to the SSD every time the system goes to sleep and wakes up…as they say “the best is sometimes enemy of the good”.

Good luck!

JR Mora

By: jrmora71

jrmora71 — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 17:04:34 +0000

Hello:
I had the same freezing problems after closing the lid and going to sleep mode in my maxed up MacBook Pro (17″ 2.93GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 8GB 1067 MHz DDR3 RAM, 250GB OCZ Vertex SSD). Very annoying! Nonetheless, after googling a lot, I apparently solved this proble by changing the sleeping mode modality from “3” (default in the newest machines) to “0” (older modality).

Here is a more detailed explanation:

pmset -g | grep hibernatemode hibernatemode 3

sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0

Press Return, and you’ll be asked for your password. Provide it, and your sleep mode has been changed. Note that restarting is not required for these changes to take effect.

cd /var/vm
sudo rm sleepimage

Good luck!

JR Mora

By: gerry

gerry — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 07:44:33 +0000

I’ve been having pretty much all of the above problems for a couple of months. It began when I put it in to get the keyboard replaced. They also upgraded the system to panther, and put in extra ram. Ever since I got it back it hasn’t functioned properly. It is pretty close to useless to me. Been running parallels for my trading software and it”s costing me money. I’ve been using Mac”s for 15 years, but over the last couple of years I’m becoming more and more pissed off with apple. I think they’re more interested in selling ipods lately, than looking after customers that have been loyal users. I’ll probably keep my mac, but I’m also getting a PC to use as my main computer. It’s an old story. Companies start up small with good service, but as they grow larger they care more about money and less about customer service. I’m soooo pissed off. I’ve waded thru many forums to try and find an answer, but nobody seems to have a solution. I’m definately NOT going to risk any more hard earned on another MAC.

By: Nikush

Nikush — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 15:19:46 +0000

I have had the SAME problem with my Macbook, I called Apple Care like 50 million times but they never FIXED it

By: mona

mona — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 00:03:26 +0000

Purchased MacBook pro in Dec. 07 (going from G4 which I never had problems with for 4 years) and have had one freeze after the other, especially since I ‘ve started using iphoto with my new digital camera. I have had to force quit it many times. When I click on pictures to open sometimes it opens them in “bit looking” garble accompanied by the spinning ball. This seems to happen quite frequently when I am in “view full screen” and seems to be getting worse. Today I had puzzle looking things showing up in random places on the screen.
Who knows. When the “fan” starts up it seems to interfere with the programs I have running. When I have it in “view full screen” I also can’t switch between pictures via top display without getting spinning ball. Slow.
Also the noise that it makes at times sounds like the bank drive-in-teller capsule shoot or like an airplane getting ready to take off.
When I went to open Itunes a few days ago none of my music was there.
I am not a computer wizard so my daughter helped me drag my music folder into itunes. All of my playlists were gone.
REALLY disappointed so far in this computer.

By: Law

Law — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 11:19:43 +0000

I finally got my first ever Mac this week – a Macbook Pro to be more precise – I’ve used it two days in a row running nothing more than Adium, Firefox and VMWare Fusion (Windows programmer by trade) – I’ve noticed my RAM is pretty much 100% taken, I occasionally get OS lockups (dock/menubar/programs), if I can get the system to shutdown via the powerbutton it takes about 10 minutes mid-lockups to get it done, otherwise its a hard reset.

So far – impressed with alot of nice features (love auto-dim and lighted keys) – but also slightly disapointed as I was always told OSX was slimmer and more stable than XP, so far I’ve had to restart the macbook maybe 3 times a day.

I will try to add extra RAM (although I already have 2GB) – but I’m slightly worried……

By: rich

rich — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 06:39:37 +0000

It’s been irritating as hell to me!
I’ve been doing a lot of e-mail writing lately.
I’ll have completed a 2 paragraph long message, and it freezes up and wont send.
terrible!

By: Row1

Row1 — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 03:29:18 +0000

I purchased my computer in Aug 2007. The screen broke within 3 days, but the store was kind enough to swap it out for a new computer. I upgraded the new computer to Leopard the day the program came out. My keyboard stopped working once or twice but I thought the issue was resolved when the new firmware came out. Everything was running great until this past month. First, my computer would wake from sleep, but the screen would remain black, so I would have to do a hard reboot. Then, my keyboard and track pad (this is a continuing problem) sporadically would go out of commission. The latest problem is the kernel problem (the curtain of death descends) and I am asked to restart (which, if I’m lucky, I can do if my trackpad is working, lest I have to perform a hard reboot again). Some one help! I have reset the PRAM multiple times and this resolves the keyboard issue temporarily. I took the computer in and they said I have to send it to Apple. This sucks because I have finals this week and I need my laptop to take the exams in class (my school is out of loaners). What is going on? I thought this was a software problem, but reloading Leopard did not work (archiving of course). If this was a hardware problem, why does the computer work sometimes and not others? Any secret fix would be great (at least until Finals are over when I can send this computer to apple).

By: Darryl

Darryl — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 14:53:54 +0000

Sorry to hear about your troubles. I think that Macbooks are really great to have, however I too, get the “kernel panic” whenever two or more apps are running at the same time…or sometimes just out of nowhere like in the middle of a movie! Also very annoying!

By: Daniel B

Daniel B — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 05:18:58 +0000

I have had similar issues that Grodge describes. My mbp has been a real letdown since I bought it in November 2007. After a faulty optical drive and logic board replacement, I have regular keyboard freezes and serious problems with time machine and sleep. Both render internet access unavailable and require restarts. Total bummer. My keyboard also sucks. Sluggish and really annoying. I never had any issues with my G4 Powerbook, which I happily used for 7 yrs until I had to put it down last year.

By: Phil M

Phil M — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 21:21:18 +0000

grodge, I’m experiencing the same. I thought it was a RAM issue, but it still happens w/a different chip. Have you had any luck trouble shooting? I’ve done a few clean installs, absolutely no dice.

By: grodge

grodge — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 19:19:24 +0000

im having ferocious trouble with my mbp. got it in november and it has not been smooth. time machine issues that were not fixed with update, error 10810 after a couple hours use, system freeze after a long time in sleep mode. i say i have to restart the computer about twice a day (on a good day!). who do i turn to?? am i alone? i cant find any info on the net about these problems.

By: Mr. Mayor

Mr. Mayor — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 19:35:54 +0000

Cool Frank, thanks for that!

That’s exactly what I did.. Submitted the bug report knowing that Apple will get around to fixing whatever it was.

As far as avoiding the steps I took to cause the error… Oh boy, I have no idea what I was doing at the time 🙂

By: sticky_bit

sticky_bit — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 19:10:35 +0000

I has similar issues on my 2.33 MacBook Pro with Tiger and it led to a logic board replacement under Apple Care. I now have 10.5 installed and have had zero issues across the board thus far.

By: Frank Cantu

Frank Cantu — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 18:01:47 +0000

Congratulations! You just experienced your very own kernel panic!

Think of it like the blue screen of death for the Mac. These aren’t as common nowadays as before, but they do tend to happen mostly with new software that still has a bug here and there. There’s really not much you can do except file a bug report to Apple — and try not to replicate the steps that caused the error or chances are you might get it again.