[OSX-Users] trouble with mbp freezes, help

[Vladimiro Sassone]

Hi there,

	I have had this macbook pro (mid 2010) for about a month, and it went splendidly. Since yesterday, that is. 

	After applying the  EFI firmware update 1.9, the machine immediately started freezes every few minutes. Exactly the problem that the update was mean to address:

> The update resolves a rare issue that may cause the system to freeze during startup or intermittently stall during operation,


and which indeed I never had! And if it was rare before, I can assure you it's only too frequent now...

Typically a programme becomes unresponsive (eg, iTunes), and then (possibly trying to deal with that) the user interface hangs, precisely a "WindowServer" process, which takes 100% cpu, and soon all the UI grinds to a halt, and the entire machine must be forced to shut down. (There is a huge thread on apple support about similar problems, which relate them with graphic card faults...)

Although this might be a hardware fault developed minutes before the EFI update without me noticing it, I suspect (and hope) something went wrong when flashing the firmware. Don't have much of a clue about what to do, I would just like try and reinstall the firmware, but the updater will not run twice! Anybody knows how to force it? (Eg, add the current ROM number to the list of updatable ROMs...)

Any other idea? 

Thanks,
\vs

(To make things more interesting, I am away at a conference meant to give a talk on Tue I was going to prepare on this machine, if it were not broken, that is. Probably will not try anything too dangerous before my talk is done, and keep my fingers crossed the mbp will not day on me in the next 24 hours...)

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