Mac freezes

C

ComputerDude

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for the past couple days my Mac has been freezing yesterday it froze when i was playing a game. Today it froze just beein idle on the desktop i was using it not even two minutes before it froze then i went to you it and the mouse and keyboard had no response. I have never had a mac lock up i didnt think it was possible being based on UNIX and UNIX systems are designed to be on 24/7 with rarely any shutdowns or restarts. So what would make it freeze?
 
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"Help US . . . to Help YOU!"

We need far more information such as what computer you are using, HD size, how much of it is full, OS, RAM, et cetera since the solution can vary greatly depending on what you are using. For example--on my Late Lamented Widdle Pismo I would be reporting the same thing every time I tried to write a paper on M$ Word while listening to streaming radio on Firefox as the programs over-ran my RAM and processor speed!

If the same thing happened on my current model . . . I would be a bit more worried!

--J.D.
 
2004 eMac USB 2.0 1.25GB RAM (soon to be 2GB) 160GB HDD (130GB OS X and 8GB Linux) last time i checked it said i had i believe 10GB used its running Leopard. During both freezes i have Trillian and TenFourFox running in the background yesterday my game was running full screen today my game, Trillian, TenFourFox, MacTubes and Transmission were running in the background and the computer was idle at the desktop.
 
Reads like you are overtaxing your system. I do not know those programs, but if TenFourFox is anything like Firefox was/still is it may be a notorious Memory Sink. Even now, FF at "idle" will hog ~500 MB of RAM. When you only have 1-2 GB of RAM . . . you can see the problem? This happened with my Widdle Pismo which had only 2GB. With my current 8 GB that is not so much of a problem.

I DID however do that recently rendering video with iMovie--foolishly set it to "MOST AWESOME MAKE BIG FILE SUPER RENDERING YOU WILL NOT NOTICE ON AN HD SCREEN YOU FOOL!" which tried to turn ~200 MB-600 MB files into 3-6 GB size all while surfing [Porn.--Ed.] on FireFox and listening to iTunes.

Sure enough . . . FREEZE! I overran the capabilities of the computer.

Fine, how to diagnose that? Run Activity Monitor and see how much processor and memory you are using. See if you are nearly running out of RAM/processor.

The next thing you can do is go to Console and post what is happening when your freeze happens. It is all Etruscan to me, but the Gurus HERE can usually interpret it and tell you what is happening.

If not all of that, the next question is when is the last time you have "cleaned" your computer? Consider the free program Onyx and run the scripts. You may have huge caches lying about taking up space.

Before doing anything, though, make sure you back up your data if it is critical.

--J.D.
 
Which means you have a problem. Incidentally, slamming shut programs can be a bit like shutting your computer off and on--it can create errors that propagate.

Would suggest running Activity Monitor and doing what you do that generates freezing and seeing what happens. IF you have to reboot to get out of a freeze you very much may have damaged your volume. I have done this in the past. What happens is, eventually, your volume fails--like when I was traveling BUT I NEED MY COMPUTER!!1!!.

So I would also add going to the FAQ I wrote on "My Data is MISSING!" to see how to use Disk Utilities to make sure your volume is fine. You can ignore the stuff about Disk Warrior--though that is a good program to have.

--J.D.
 
MainMenu will repair all disk problems when it scans speaking of data missing i plugged in my external usb hard drive and os x wiped it clean
 
no i didnt intend to at that time i didnt have net hooked to my mac so i used my linux computer to tranfer the OS X drivers to my OS X compatable USB Wifi card to my hard drive when i plugged it in it mounted and it popped up but the drive was empty plugged it back into my linux machine and OS X did indeed wipe it clean just plugging it in
 
OS X will not simply erase a hard drive by merely plugging it into the computer -- it will always prompt you before doing so (typically by displaying a dialog that says something akin to "I don't recognize the format of this drive. Would you like to initialize it?").

If you plugged in a USB hard drive to your Mac and it went ahead and formatted the drive, then you have serious problems with your Mac that need further diagnosis. Absolutely no changes are made to any hard drive (save for a .DS_Store file here or there on HFS/HFS+-formatted drives) by merely plugging them in. The user must take deliberate actions in order to erase a hard drive, which typically consist of one of two things:

1) Instructing OS X to "initialize" the drive when prompted that the drive is in an unrecognized format
2) Opening Disk Utility and specifically making deliberate changes to the partition and/or format of the drive

This may be off-base and off-topic, but you sound eerily similar to LeoTheLion89... :) Same computers, same software, same operating systems, same writing style (which I call the "minimalist punctuation liberation movement"), same problems. You two related?
 
Doctor X said:
Which means you have a problem. Incidentally, slamming shut programs can be a bit like shutting your computer off and on--it can create errors that propagate.

Would suggest running Activity Monitor and doing what you do that generates freezing and seeing what happens. IF you have to reboot to get out of a freeze you very much may have damaged your volume. I have done this in the past. What happens is, eventually, your volume fails--like when I was traveling BUT I NEED MY COMPUTER!!1!!.

So I would also add going to the FAQ I wrote on "My Data is MISSING!" to see how to use Disk Utilities to make sure your volume is fine. You can ignore the stuff about Disk Warrior--though that is a good program to have.

--J.D.
Click to expand...
i took note and TenFourFox and my particular game took up over 128MB RAM each Trillian takes up almost 40MB
 
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