10.4.2 is freezing my Mac!

[briandunning]

Ever since installing 10.4.2 this afternoon, my Mac stays up for only 5-10 minutes max before freezing. No crash or panic, just a solid frozen mouse on the screen and no keyboard or mouse input. Have to hard reboot with the power button. I tried repairing permissions, didn't help. I left Activity Monitor in the foreground once and waited for it to crash, and when it did, there was nothing amiss - no processes hogging CPU or anything.

Any suggestions? I'm in panic mode here.

[Cube]

Restore your backup 10.4.1. You did backup, right?

[Lt Major Burns]

i'm guessing not. not many people are paranoid (or rich enough) to back before every little patch. nor should they have to.

we need to find a solution to fix the current system. is there a roll-back 3rd party app? like the amazing system restore on xp?

[gphillipk]

like the amazing system restore on xp?

Gasp! ...amazing you say?! Why, you oughta be flogged for that...there're some serious viruses that take advantage of System Restore; you run anti-virus and clean out your PC. Next time you switch on the viruses are back. I run my PC with Sys Restore turned off.
But I get your point, MacOSX ought to have an integrated tool for rollbacks

[pds]

maybe running top while working will tell you what's hogging cpu cycles when it goes south (open terminal (in the utilities folder in applications) and type "top" at the prompt - just in case - no offense )

[cpurser]

Lots of weird effects of 10.4.2. I'm waiting a while...

http://www.macintouch.com/tiger26.html

[ag]

I had exactly the same problem with my screen freezing after updating to 10.4.2. I spent hours searching forums online (hard re-booting every 10-15 minutes after each freeze) for an answer. Last night I think I figured it out... (I haven't had a freeze since then - fingers crossed).

At first I thought it might be the 1gb Ram upgrade that I added to my new 12 inch powerbook 1.5GHz with superdrive that came installed with Tiger 10.4.1. Most forums seem to point to hardware problems as a cause for screen freezes. There was no rhyme or reason to each freeze. It wasn't specific to a particular application, so I was sure it must be a hardware issue.

Meanwhile, one of the many third party "widgets" I had installed during what I call widget-mania to describe the initial excitement with using this new feature had crashed unexpectedly so I decided to use Tiger's new widget manager to delete all third party widgets from lesser known sources. I also swapped the RAM upgrade with the original 256Mb stick and re-booted. No freezes. I worked on it for a while and no problems, I couldn't make it freeze no matter how many applications I switched between or used, opened or quit. So, I returned the 1Gb RAM stick back and I haven't had a freeze since. I will update if the situation changes, but for now I believe the widget is the culprit!