MacOS – Need help in figuring out why the MacBook (mid 2012) crashes even after reinstalling ElCapitan

crashhangmacos

My MB Pro mid 2012 is crashing since already some time quite often.
~2 years ago I put in 16GB Ram and a Samsung Evo SSD, no problems after that. Just recently those "crashes" started to appear.

What happens is that the current window freezes and then it seems like a chain reaction freezing everything else. I can open the force quit window and applications do close when force quit, if I relaunch Finder, the dock (and finder?) seems not to work (frozen dock in weird position). No Finder appears again in the force quit window.

The system temperature is then increasing quite rapidly and I have to turn off the MB by holding down the start button.

So, yesterday I reinstalled ElCapitan. Since then everything was fine. But now it just happened again.

I am worried that the computer is being damaged, and also since it's annoying I would like to figure this out for good.

It seems not to be the Safari problem that was in the news recently since my MB is older and the newest ELCapitan update is installed. I also ran chrome and I still had crashes (before reinstall).

Can you please let me know how to proceed?

Under Console I have a lot of files, including 4 crash reporter files from: com.apple.networking.eapol.log.20160623T225508-04.gz

and 2 diagnostic reports from backupd and Clean my Mac 3.

Please let me know how to proceed, I would appreciate your help a lot.

Best,
Moritz

Best Answer

When you have spontaneous problems with your Mac, there are several things you can try to resolve the issue (listed in order of increasing difficulty):

  1. Reset SMC
  2. Reset PRAM/NVRAM
  3. Swap out memory modules*
  4. Swap out hard drive*

The SMC (System Management Controller) handles a lot of low-level system components. Fan issues, power issues, or spontaneous program unresponsiveness can occur if SMC is having problems.

NVRAM (Non-Volatile Random-Access Memory, or PRAM in older Macs) stores system settings that the Mac needs to access quickly. Resetting it doesn't always fix anything you are describing above, but it also never hurts to try it as part of your troubleshooting.

If you have a bad memory module, you'll get weird crashes and system hangs. If you have multiple chips installed (e.g. two 8 GB modules) try removing one, then if no issues, switch and run the system with the other chip for a while. Possible that only one of the two is bad.

If your hard drive is bad, you'll get periodic problems and unpredictable behavior. Unfortunately, a bad hard drive can also mean lost user data... so hopefully you have backups if your drive turns out to be the problem.

(*For those with newer Macs - swapping out memory or hard drives is obviously not a possibility if they're soldered to the system board.)

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