I have had an 240gb Corsair SSD in my 2.53 GHz Intel Core i5 Macbook Pro (OSX 10.6.8) for about 8 months. The computer has 8gb RAM. It has been great for most of that time, but in the last month or so, I have experienced the following problem:
Whenever I open an application, the computer becomes unresponsive for about 5 seconds. I can move the mouse but clicking has no effect, and the keyboard does not work. The screen continues to behave normally (it shows the application opening screen, background applications and iTunes will continue working, etc), I just can't click or type anything.
What can I do to get to the bottom of this? Nothing immediately jumps out when I look at Activity Monitor.
There are 50gb of free space on the SSD, and RAM is maxed out at 8GB. The computer is otherwise fine, though seems to freeze a lot when using Chrome (I hear this is not uncommon).
Update: I had the same problem on a clone of my hard drive running on a standard HD (non-SSD), so the SSD is irrelevant.
Best Answer
The issue turned out to be with a background program, Typinator 5.3. The problem only occurred while Typinator was active. Upgrading to Typinator 5.4 seems to have fixed the problem.