Resolved Beach ball and freezing on 2009 MBP

[KUguardgrl13]

The machine in question is the one in my signature: Mid-2009 13" MBP 2.26 ghz C2D 8 gb RAM new 500 gb HDD.

Recently it has been freezing and getting the beach ball occasionally when I switch to Adobe Reader or Word 2008. The app freezes up and stops responding until I force quit. It's happened twice, once while having chrome open with maybe five tabs and running Word and another time not connected to the Internet running an e-textbook in chrome from cache, a Word doc for reference, and a PDF.

I go into Activity Monitor after I shut the frozen program down and free RAM is about 5 gb.

Any thoughts? I just installed this RAM last month. Both 4 gb sticks are being read, so I don't think there's a problem there, but I'm no expert.

 

[Buckaye]

so it never happened before you installed the ram? What is the brand of the Ram?

I'd say - just from the description and if this only happened after you installed the new ram, that the Ram might be the issue especially since it seems to be doing this during a switching operation.

The only other thing I would suggest is insuring you are absolutely up to date with all software updates.

 

[KUguardgrl13]

Definitely not the first time I've had a program freeze on me. I think I'm just paranoid that something would go wrong with this new RAM. It's Crucial.

Looking through Console I think it was some leftover bloat ware from some old programs that somehow Word thinks it needs to access. Why it thinks it needs to connect to TI graphing calculator software I don't know.

 

[Buckaye]

yeah if it's crucial I would tend to trust it.... Just make sure you save a lot and see if it becomes more reproducible. Hate to say it... but MS is probably not doing a lot to update 2008 anymore...so it's pretty possible it hates the mac

 

[KUguardgrl13]

Yeah it's probably time to update to 2011, although I suspect there will be a new version soon. But I'm graduating next year so I should get it while it's only $11.99

 

[RoboWarriorSr]

Similar problem got a motherboard replacement when I showed Apple. Granted I had Apple Care+. 2009 models are quite slow by today's standards anyway.