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Several times today, my Mac (10.6 Snow Leopard) has frozen up. The cursor has become fixed (movable, but the cursor does not change), the screen unresponsive (nothing highlights when I roll over it, I can't interact with any program, or the menu bar). This problem has occurred while working in a number of different applications, Chrome, Thunderbird, Xcode.
I hit alt-cmd + esc to open the force quite dialog, which does work. I've discovered that the system recovers, regardless of which application I close, e.g. I get a freeze when working in Chrome. I bring up Force Close and close Activity Monitor, which has been running in the background for a while. Everything now works again.
My current solution is to keep something non-essential, like Activity Monitor running all the time, so that when the problem does occur I'm not forced to FC something critical (and yes, it still occurs when Activity Monitor is not running). I'm stumped as to what this could be, I only have a few (4-5) applications running at once, the load on the system is minimal. The seems to occur when typing, but as I'm using the keyboard 99% of the time (in Xcode or the terminal) that's not really that helpful.
How can I prevent this annoying lock-up?
fredley
Posted 2011-09-30T13:52:25.400
Reputation: 3 197
Which Mac model do you have? Have you already tried the usual things like cold boot and repairing permissions? – guenter – 2011-10-03T20:05:28.807
Cold boot hasn't fixed, what is repairing permissions? I'll be able to check the model tomorrow (it's at work). – fredley – 2011-10-03T22:02:35.067
see this wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repair_permissions. Repairing pernmissions is discussed controversial, but it don't hurts to try it out.
– guenter – 2011-10-03T22:09:15.983Does Console.app show anything when this happens? Does '$ sudo opensnoop' yield any valuable data? – polynomial – 2011-10-04T02:41:07.993
1OS 10.4 is not Snow Leopard, it's Tiger. Snow Leopard is 10.6. Which one are you actually running? – Matt – 2011-10-06T23:11:56.000
Check the system logs around the times of these incidents. Should be in /var/log. – CarlF – 2011-10-07T18:49:47.930
Is it sufficient to open the force-quit dialog and then close it or do you really have to whap and app? – Ram – 2011-10-08T18:22:03.607
@Matt 10.6, sorry. – fredley – 2011-10-08T18:30:03.247
1@Ram it's actually sufficient just to open it. – fredley – 2011-10-08T18:30:19.893
What are you working on with Xcode? – Ram – 2011-10-09T18:13:50.377
@Ram Code... What else could affect it? – fredley – 2011-10-09T22:36:47.940
dunno -> I'm fishing – Ram – 2011-10-10T16:20:39.657