[megasad]

Five times since I got my MacBook back last weekend, it has "crashed" in a way I have never seen a Mac crash before. Here is what it does:

1 - Menu bar clock stops completely; freezes at a time and will not change. I have seconds displayed, so I see exactly when it stops.
2 - The cursor remains responsive, in that I can move it around, but I cannot click on anything.
3 - Nor can I interract with anything via the keyboard; Command-Tab doesn't let me move between applications, Command-Option-Escape doesn't being up the Force Quit window, Exposé doesn't work at all.
4 - One time, I had iTunes playing. Though I could not interact with the OS in any way (I tried the volume keys even!) the song kept playing... But did not move onto the next song.

So, when the above happens, I've tried leaving my computer alone, in hopes that it will work itself out... But it does not, and so I hold the power button down for a few seconds to force a reboot.

To me, it seems like an OS issue, rather than a hardware one, but that could just be me hoping that's all it is. Has anyone else experienced similar symptoms?

[Yakov]

never saw that happen. if you get that a lot, you should bring it to the store

[Hi I'm Ben]

Is the hard drive making any strange noises when all this occurs? Also what RAM did you end up sticking in the laptop.

If it's an OS issue my only goess would be that it's something third-party you installed. It's very unlikely a standard machine image from apple would have a problem.

[jokell82]

This used to happen to me all the time with my iBook G3. I could sometimes snap it out of the crash by removing the power adapter, and if that didn't work replacing the power adapter and removing the battery. 90% of the time it would go back to normal, but sometimes it took a while.

Never did figure out what was wrong - an apple hardware test told me everything was OK.

[megasad]

Originally Posted by Yakov

never saw that happen. if you get that a lot, you should bring it to the store

If it keeps happening and I can't work out why, I surely will.

Originally Posted by Hi I'm Ben

Is the hard drive making any strange noises when all this occurs? Also what RAM did you end up sticking in the laptop.

No strange noises, no. I had the original 15GB drive in my iBook die, so I checked its SMART status and that's fine. I'm using the 2GB of Transcend RAM and both Apple Hardware Test and memtest say it's fine.

Originally Posted by Hi I'm Ben

If it's an OS issue my only goess would be that it's something third-party you installed. It's very unlikely a standard machine image from apple would have a problem.

I think so too, the problem is I don't know how to work out what it is specifically. At a guess though, the last thing I installed before I sent my MacBook in for two weeks for the logic board replacement was Parallels Desktop. Before I sent it in, I didn't have this problem and I didn't use Parallels enough (it was on there for only a day) to see if that was the cause. So, a couple of days ago I disabled the "Parallels Host-Guest Adapter" network connection in the Network preference pane, and (touch wood) I haven't had the freezy issue since.

Originally Posted by jokell82

This used to happen to me all the time with my iBook G3. I could sometimes snap it out of the crash by removing the power adapter, and if that didn't work replacing the power adapter and removing the battery. 90% of the time it would go back to normal, but sometimes it took a while.

I shall keep this in mind in case this happens again, thank you.

Originally Posted by jokell82

Never did figure out what was wrong - an apple hardware test told me everything was OK.

Said test says everything's fine with my machine too, which is why I think it is a software problem.