MBP freezing?

spidermonkey

I have a macbook pro (last revision before the introduction of the gestures trackpad)

With about 2 weeks it seems to freeze every now and then.
I begins with the trackpad acting glitchy, as if it were a dirty mouse, then it stops altogether and then it freezes completely, trackpad, keyboard & screen (was loading this website and the little loading icon in a safari tab froze too)

the fans keep running though, and the power button works as im able to press it and then up pops the "would you like to restart/shut down dialog window"

...and then i have to force shutdown with the power button as the keyboard is non responsive. If i plug in my mighty mouse it wont track onscreen either.

I assume it is a full system crash?

any ideas on how to find out what the problem/solution could be?
I plan on doing a complete reinstall in a week or so when i've everything backed up, but it would be nice to know for future reference.

forbairt

Something similar was happening to me a while back ...

I put it down to the browsers I was running believe it or not
(removed firebug) and upgraded firefox / safari and all is working fine now ...

Probably a different issue for you however

( was just a trial and error effort on my part to finally notice it was probably the browsers )

J-blk

If it's still reacting to the power button, the system has not completely crashed but probably some application is messing things up. Do the fans ramp up at all when it happens (which would indicate high CPU usage)? You could try (easier if you have a secondary monitor connected), open Activity Monitor, filter by CPU usage and keep it visible while you work - you may then be able to see what is using up most CPU cycles when the system goes glitchy on you. If the keyboard is still responding when the trackpad is going glitchy, try hitting Cmd + Space to bring up Spotlight, type Act to get to the activity monitor...

spidermonkey

thanks for the replies, what ye've both said makes sense, i've only noticed it when I'm tethered to my iPhone over wifi and surfing the net thought the tethered wifi connection, so it could be a wifi issue with too many pings or something alone those lines. I remember that the laptop did crash last Christmas when I using a torrent program on a wifi network, there were a load of seeders and the laptop did similar to what it's doing now.

pleasant Co.

My MBP is freexing a hell of a lot lately!, today alone it has frozen 10 times... the only programmes running are transmission, firefox and little snitch. In my case when the computer freezes I can still move the mouse, open folders...but as soon as I try to open an application or change anything it totally locks up...i'm left with the only option of holding down the power button until it switches off.

I'll be doing a hardware test/full system restore in a few days when I have the disc again.