12-12-2009, 02:24 PM

Hey,

For the past couple of months my Macbook has been doing some strange things, one (and most annoyingly) of these things is that the volume keeps muting itself.

My macbook has started to hang quite often as well, and everytime it hangs, the volume mutes.

Also, when I begin to play a video either from hard drive or DVD, there will be no sound (even if the volume control is unmuted) for about 20 seconds, and the video will keep freezing and hanging for anything from 30 seconds to a few minutes.

Two days ago, in an effort to fix this problem I reinstalled OS X (using the archive and install option - as I didn't want to have to reinstall and recover everything) and for these two days it was working beautifully, and since last night (when I reinstalled Pro Tools LE 8 because for some reason my Mbox wasn't connecting) it has been playing up again.

Before reinstalling the OS I had looked around on forums and support pages to try and find answers or solutions, there were posts from this saying that defragging was the way forward, so I purchased iDefrag and it defragmented my highly fragmented hard drive, but it didn't solve it. Then I read that strange behaviour and lessened performance can be caused by a lack of HDD space (I had 16GB left out of a 160GB HDD) so I upgraded to a 320GB HDD - still no luck.

I have also tried resetting the PRAM, and running the Apple Hardware Test. Neither have made any difference.

Has anyone got any clues as to why this is happening?

I have a Macbook (White 2008) with OS X 10.5.8.

Thanks
Lee

12-12-2009, 02:29 PM

Originally Posted by leehfp

Two days ago, in an effort to fix this problem I reinstalled OS X (using the archive and install option - as I didn't want to have to reinstall and recover everything) and for these two days it was working beautifully, and since last night (when I reinstalled Pro Tools LE 8 because for some reason my Mbox wasn't connecting) it has been playing up again.

This could very well be the source of your problem. You note that the problem only started occurring again after you reinstalled Pro Tools. Have you tried uninstalling Pro Tools to see if this is indeed causing you issues?

12-12-2009, 03:02 PM

Sorry, I forgot to mention that since reinstalling pro tools I reinstalled OS X and the problem returned within a few hours - without installing pro tools.

This problem also began before I had pro tools at all, so i don't think pro tools is the cause.

Thanks for your help though, its appreciated!

12-12-2009, 03:08 PM

Good to know that someone else has the same or similar problem as I do.

My volume goes mute every time i restart, i have to go in to sys prefs and chance the setting to internal speakers for it to work.

My disk drive makes weird noises, safari crashes every time i open it.

When i open dashboard, it crashes the entire system and I have to do a hard reboot.

I have the 13" Aluminum macbook, April 2009.

I have reset PRAM, reinstalled software, tried disk utility.. nothing helps!

Please post on this thread if you find something that fixes your problem! Thanks and good luck!

12-14-2009, 04:29 PM

Hey,

I think I just solved my problem. Hopefully it will help you too!

Basically, when I signed up to Natwest Online Banking, they suggested to me to download a piece of software called Rapport Security. It was free, and downloadable from Natwest's website.

And it seems to be this terribly engineered piece of software that has been causing ALL my problems.

I noticed in my activity monitor that Rapport wasn't responding - I'd noticed this before but have always put off uninstalling it for some reason, and the thought never crossed my mind that it was Rapport causing the issues.

I decided to uninstall it this evening and there wasn't a straight forward way of doing it, so I researched (googled) it and apparently this software has caused Mac users problems strange problems before.

After uninstalling it, my macbook was almost miraculously back to normal! No more volume problems, no system hangs...so far anyway. Although I'm confident that this has now been solved, if the problem returns I'll let you know.

To uninstall Rapport, you need to go to your Library folder and find the Rapport folder.

In there is a file called RapportUninstaller.sh this is a shell file, and if you open the file with Terminal, the unistaller will run and Rapport will be gone banished from your system!

Hope this helps you! Good luck!

Lee