05-05-2012, 05:28 PM

hi folks, i have spent the past week utterly confused by the actions of my santa rosa '07 MPB (i know, its like the pinto of MBP's). i have owned it for five years and i had the NVIDEA card replaced, and i am pretty positive it isn't that.

the first thing that i noticed was that itunes wiped out my ipod. crashed, froze, force quit- and got an clean ipod as a consequence. after rebuilding the music library i left it on the external HD in case it happened again. which it did- three times.
i had JUST updated to the new itunes, as well as updated my safari, right before. so it led me to believe it was a software problem.

safari started being increasingly erratic, dumping me off, freezing, at least a few times a day. strangely enough, high intensity programs like after effects have given me NO problems. itunes, safari and strangely enough, garageband are all exhibiting unusual behavior. when i open garage band, the media browser is no longer showing up my itunes. its all grayed out and it won't let me dump anything into the browser either.

a few days ago, i got disk warrior and checked everything out.all my external HDs were fine. but disk warrior would freeze on trying to repair permissions, then say "disk warrior is unable to repair". ok.

so i do disk utility. a slew of permissions were fixed, and seemed to help the performance a shade. for a few hours.

then i did apple hardware test. i got a '4SNS....TGOD" error message. thermal sensor on the logic board, perhaps neccesitating replacing the board. OMFG.

then i booted up disk utility from my install disc. no problems, HD is fine. and just now, i ran the hardware test three times. NO ERRORS.

WTF? i tested for viruses- nothing. HD tests all come back positive no matter what diagnostic tool i run. temp sensor app and istat have shown constant, steady, normal temps the entire time this has all been going on. my fans don't run incessantly. never have. i have done PRAM and SMC resets.

but still my same issues with itunes freezing and safari freezing persist. obviously, a clean install is the next order of business. what i am wanting to know is if anyone else has had a panopoly of issues like this and what the outcome is. i know logic boards fail for god's sake, but i have been experiencing very specific problems with very specific programs and not sure if that may be contributing to a false error message.

also - i have never done a hardware test til now. is it possible that my temp sensor could have been bad for a long long time and i wouldn't know it? overheating has never been an issue for me.

any and all thoughts folks have on this, including "me too" experiences, i would like to hear. i know i am not the only one with the issue of the new version of itunes being problematical, and "4SNS" errors seem to be fairly common. ideas?

05-05-2012, 11:39 PM

I know you said the hard drive is fine but I have had many "fine" hard drives fail on me, sometimes right after running tests which they passed with flying colors.

It sounds like your hard drive is acting up. It wouldn't hurt to swap it out. Make sure you have a good backup first - you should be doing backups anyway.

As far as the AHT is concerned, it sometimes gives a false warning and other times it misses some things. It can be useful but not relied on 100%.

05-06-2012, 02:34 AM

Originally Posted by chscag

I know you said the hard drive is fine but I have had many "fine" hard drives fail on me, sometimes right after running tests which they passed with flying colors.

It sounds like your hard drive is acting up. It wouldn't hurt to swap it out. Make sure you have a good backup first - you should be doing backups anyway.

As far as the AHT is concerned, it sometimes gives a false warning and other times it misses some things. It can be useful but not relied on 100%.

yeah, that could be true. puter ran fine until i did updates to itunes, safari and java, and i still have my time machine backups and backups on external media, so i am going to try and roll back and see if that doesn't bring me some stability. ive read of alot of people having trouble with all the new updates and i don't know if that is part of my problem. meanwhile all my temp sensors are still fine. but if it is the HD i would prefer that over a logic board anyday.