Freezing MacBook.

[Akkarin]

Hi,

I have a late 2009 15" MacBook pro. The company I bought it from won't speak to me anymore. I have been nice and been 2 months without a computer now as they courier it away for a month for a hard drive swap. I think I may need to go around them direct to apple care as I have that on this machine still it came with the machine. Third party disaster.

The third party (I won't name names) changed a hard drive which had genuinely failed (they said they sent it to an apple registered company after being told to by apple care to do it) when I got it back the problems all started. They took it back did another drive and returned same problem still there. I paid them the same as Apple care daft aye to deal with all this for me if it happened.

The problem is not software well can't be OSX has been reinstalled on each new drive.

I get intermittent freezes especially when copying files and playing media. It never did this before. The screen also goes blurry when this freeze happens it is very weird. It is doing it enough to make the machine unusable - i.e saving work etc as it when it comes back it rushes ahead suddenly and no idea where I was clicking in frustration.

Nothing I have chased down software wise makes a difference everything from disabling universal access and spotlight to running new clean and updated osx.

Force quit does nothing it won't load when it freezes the activity meter pauses. Then boom it ignites back in so I get a stuttering macbook.

I can't see any application eating cpu time or memory.

I have had laptops do this before on me but not macs and they ended up in the bin but were much older this is only just over a year and half old I don't want to bin it!

Anyone seen these symptoms before?

[Doctor X]

1. Cancel the checks/have your credit card company cancel the payment to the place you purchased the piece of poo.

2. If you have Apple Care deal directly with Apple.

3. Do not be surprised if the idiots who sold it to you not only used an inferior HD they installed crappy RAM. Failing RAM mimics everything including neurosyphillis. . . .

--J.D.

[Giaguara]

The hard drive could be slow and/or just poor quality, and there may be problems with the RAM, as Doctor X said. Especially a bad RAM can create problems with any software that is run on the system, so that is a strong possible reason.

You could run Apple Hardware Test, or memtest, to see if errors are detected on either (memtest tests only the memory. Details for how to run the hardware tests are in the Howto&FAQ section of the forum. To test for bad RAM you should run the test for a few hours or ideally overnight, extended tests)

It sucks when a Mac suffers in hands that it shouldn't have been trusted in for the repairs. If those repairs were done when the Mac was still in warranty, it would not be bad to tell AppleCare how the company you had it repaired sucked, so it can suffer the inevitable karma of its actions. Hardware repairs (at least on authorized service providers) have a 90 days repair warranty, so even if the normal warranty or AppleCare would have run out 1 day after you got the system from the repair, you do still have those 90 days to make sure the repair resolved the issue and didn't create any new issues.

And if you live in Europe (and bought the Mac in the same country), you may have additionally stronger rights as a consumer regarding the repairs and warranty than a US consumer would have (those rights depend a lot on the country).