Hi Sarai, I haven't seen this issue myself, but I've read reports where this type of freezing behavior can occur associated with bad RAM or a memory slot going bad, or simply one of your memory chips not being firmly enough seated in the slot, which is more likely to happen if your Mac is a laptop and you've been carrying it around for a while. Alternatively, you might need to apply EFI and SMC firmware updates. I'll point you to the Apple Knowledge Base article that gives the list of Mac models and links to the relevant firmware updates along with instructions on how to check whether you need to apply a firmware update. • EFI and SMC firmware updates for Intel-based Macs (Apple Knowledge Base article HT1237): http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1237
The SMC firmware updates the System Management Controller that controls power, fans, sleep, and battery functions. EFI stands for "Extensible Firmware Interface" and is like the BIOS on a PC. In some earlier models of the Intel Macs, it turned out that certain third party memory chips had an incompatibility with the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics card and the way it accesses memory. So when people upgraded their memory, they suddenly started seeing random freezes of the sort you describe, but it happened intermittently and was a real pain to track down. I think that's unlikely to be the case here, since that particular issue was reported at the end of 2009, but I'll just point out that it's possible to have the firmware updates in place, and have good memory, and still get the freeze problem. This is not unique to the Mac platform, but to demonstrate that this was an issue, here's the link to the archived Apple Discussion forums post from 2009 outlining the problem: • Re: Macbook Freezes after 4 GB RAM upgrade https://discussions.apple.com/message/10230653#10230653 My suggestions on checking the RAM or RAM seating are only a guess, but the diagnosis fits the circumstances of using memory intensive processes (movie playing in vlc media player). VoiceOver also requires memory resources, so this would explain why you lost VoiceOver when the system froze. If you came back up in disk utility, you'd be prompted to repair disk because likely you might have been writing to a bad sector. It's possible that there is a bad section on your disk, or perhaps your disk is very full, but it sounds more likely from the symptoms that this is memory related. Only a guess on my part. If you have a nearby Apple Store, you might have them check on this for you. With the recent laptops it is more difficult to open up the unit yourself (because they use tiny screws!), but it's relatively simple and fast for them to check, and it could be something as simple as the memory not being securely seated. With a bad disk sector you can still bring up your system if you have a bootable clone, which I think you've made before your upgrade to Lion. With a problem memory module or socket, you might not have sufficient memory for a long-term boot up (depending on how much you have in your machine for Lion, and whether you are also running a virtual machine for Windows), but a fix may be easy. Glad to hear that you recovered well. HTH. Cheers, Esther On Jul 8, 2012, at 3:59 PM, Sarai Bucciarelli wrote: > Hi: > I was playing a video someone emailed me. I was using vlc media player. The > Mac foze, video made a weird noise, and I lost speech. I powered on Mac, > Apple logo appeared. A dialog box popped up. I turned on VO, and Fred began > talking. I was in disk utilities. I could erase disk, reinstall OS, or repair > disk. I had to repair disk. Thank God, it came back. Anyone ever seen this? > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en.
