What is causing random system freezes on MacBook Air (1304)?
I went to an apple certified reseller, and the technician there did a check up on my macbook air. All the hardware seemed to be O.K. with the 'MRI' system check they did. After that he did an extended harddrive test with Disk Warrior and it froze up. So his conclusion was a broken SSD. He said replacing an SSD costed €700 ex. labor.
At home I cloned the SSD to an external harddrive using Carbon Copy Cloner, and removed the SSD from the macbook. Then I booted using my external harddisk via USB. Guess what? It still froze up. I also had a bootable USB and triple checked, again it froze up. So my conclusion is that the SSD must be fine. The apple technician drew his conclusions too quickly.
Since then I have put the SSD back in, and it seems to run more stable than before (weird). It doesn't freeze up every 2-5 minutes, rather it freezes up every 30min - 7 hours (top 7 hour heavy use without a crash). So I'm back to zero.
The problem is i'm having random freezes inside Mac OSX Mountain Lion 10.8.2. and there doesn't seem to be any particular program causing the crashes. Sometimes it's idle, sometimes its when I open finder, sometimes when I open the lid and it comes out of sleep...
Update
Unknown problem, it's not the memory either.
I do have a "solution";
I have installed kext files/drivers from within OSX Latitude E.D.P Version #4 (Rev: 71) for a Dell Dual Core based laptop (Configure Kexts, dsdt and plists) on my Macbook Air. The keyboard backlight and sound doesn't work anymore, but atleast there are no crashes. Everything else works. I wonder what is wrong.
Why does a default OSX Mountain Lion installation make the laptop unstable? And some third party drivers and configured plists that are not designed for this laptop, make it stable?
Update 2
I did the oven trick. Put the logic board in the oven for 7:40 minutes on 180 degrees Celcius so the cold solder joints could be fixed, so far so good. Here are some pictures of the proces: http://sphotos-f.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak... http://sphotos-d.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak... http://sphotos-h.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak... http://sphotos-b.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak... And after putting it back together: http://sphotos-d.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak... I'll report back in some time.
As you can see I wrapped foil around the logic board and left two spots open, for the CPU and GPU, because I was suspecting those to have bad solder/cold points. I hope the fix lasts for some time or even a long time, if not, I will repeat the process, but a little higher temperatures. But no rushing, it's running fine at the moment!
Update 3 Fixed!
Still running stable after the motherboard was put into the oven. See update 2 for details.
Questa è una buona domanda?
17 Commenti
The ram is the problem. Now I can live in peace. But the Macbook Air is completely useless. Good idea to solder the ram onto the logic board ahum. What a waste of equipment.
da Erik
Eric - Did AHT help you diagnose the problem as RAM Vs SSD or did you run Activity Monitor to discover the problem was RAM memory (bad or to little for what you where trying to do). If the RAM memory was bad I would bring the system into Apple to get it serviced and complain if they try to charge you a fee to replace it.
da Dan
The AHT decided to freeze at the test, so a logical explanation would be faulthy ram, since I have excluded the SSD (I booted from USB and other harddrive with the same problems)
BUT, there is still hope. I am running memtest86 in single user verbose mode and now in the OS itself, to burn-in the memory. What does this mean? It means i'm stressing the memory to it's fullest (and the system), which could make the RAM stable. This is called a burn in process, and takes hours or even days. Burning-in ram is known better in the pc overclocking scene, but i'm thinking it's helping stabilize my ram aswell. So far no crashes in 17 hours. I'll keep this updated and let you know if it helped.
da Erik
My thoughts are corrupt files/extensions. Maybe a corrupt font. BTW The A1237 max OS rating is 10.7.5 (with limitations) as the A1304 has provisions running 10.8 so you're pushing those boxes pretty hard. . . IMHO it would be better to run the OEM OS or drop back one rev....
da originalmachead
Very odd! I suspect some how the files you have are corrupted. Did you rename the system folder so the files there would not be reused when you re-installed OS-X. You could bring your system into an Apple Store and have them install from their copy a fresh install.
da Dan
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