OS 10.6..Screen Freezing

If I leave the computer unattended for a while or go into the sleep mode, the screen goes blank (black) and as soon as I try to reactivate it the "spinning beachball comes and that's it........anyone else with such a problem.
Thanks...

Try running disk utility and checking permissions.

Kevriano said:

Try running disk utility and checking permissions.

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Thanks, I did a bit more research and found this quoted as well as a possible solution.
The "sleep" function seems to work ok now. Will see how the rest works after having run the disk utility....thanks again.

Keep us posted.

Kevriano said:

Keep us posted.

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Unfortunately still the same problem....the sleep function seems to work fine but as soon as I leave the computer for a period of time the black screen comes, this time with the mouse pointer and as soon as I activate it...the revolving beach ball....

One thing I ran into with 10.6 was that I had some services (daemons, in UNIX-speak) running in the background that were causing intermittent issues with spinning beachballs and very slow wake from sleep.

I wouldn't have caught it except that I opened Console (Applications => Utilities folder) and found a service opening and closing.

My recommendation to you would be to open Console and see if there's anything weird going on in the logs and report back.

cwa107 said:

One thing I ran into with 10.6 was that I had some services (daemons, in UNIX-speak) running in the background that were causing intermittent issues with spinning beachballs and very slow wake from sleep.

I wouldn't have caught it except that I opened Console (Applications => Utilities folder) and found a service opening and closing.

My recommendation to you would be to open Console and see if there's anything weird going on in the logs and report back.

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Probably a daft question but what is "daemons', because this came up after the installation of 10.6 as a request to install.

le premier said:

Probably a daft question but what is "daemons', because this came up after the installation of 10.6 as a request to install.

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Not at all.

Daemons are similar to "Services" in Windows. They are programs that run in the background and are invisible to the user. Usually they are run to support other software packages that need to have a hook into the OS in order to work properly, even though the program isn't actively running.

Daemon (computer software) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Strangely enough....no problem on my MacBookPro, that works fine after the installation of 10.6 and during that there was no request to install "daemons" ???
Unless I can resolve this I will have to "downgrade" as the computer is almost unusable in this condition....shame.

le premier said:

Strangely enough....no problem on my MacBookPro, that works fine after the installation of 10.6 and during that there was no request to install "daemons" ???
Unless I can resolve this I will have to "downgrade" as the computer is almost unusable in this condition....shame.

Click to expand...

I would recommend making a backup of the machine and doing a clean install. Then, manually pull over all of the data from the backup. Install all of the apps one-by-one until you can find the offender.

I can almost guarantee you that you probably have an incompatible app that is playing up.

cwa107 said:

I can almost guarantee you that you probably have an incompatible app that is playing up.

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This brings up a worthy question. Do you have a lot of third party apps installed ? Too many to list, or only a few ? Maybe if you listed which third party apps you have installed, others might be able to say whether or not they're running the same ones and with which machines and with what success (or lack thereof) etc.. ?

Doug

Doug b said:

This brings up a worthy question. Do you have a lot of third party apps installed ? Too many to list, or only a few ? Maybe if you listed which third party apps you have installed, others might be able to say whether or not they're running the same ones and with which machines and with what success (or lack thereof) etc.. ?

Doug

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Ok thanks, I will try and go through what I have. Just checked through my iMac ( which also came up with the Daemons install question) and that is fine. It has much the same as I have on my MacPro desktop but I guess I have something installed that Snowy Leopard does not like!! What I don't understand though is that no incompatibility problems came up during the installation.

I have attached a file of installed applications if any have the time to look through.......thanks again guys.

View attachment Applications.pdf

I'm assuming that when you first installed Snow Leopard it was just the upgrade. I agree with what cwa107 said and try doing a clean install of Snow Leopard. This would mean booting from the disc, then going to Utilities in the menu bar and choosing Disk Utility, then erase the hard drive. When you install Snow Leopard then it will do a clean install.

There are quite a few programs that are known to be incompatible with Snow Leopard. Cross-reference your applications with this list:

Snow Leopard Compatibility: Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Compatibility List

le premier said:

Strangely enough....no problem on my MacBookPro, that works fine after the installation of 10.6 and during that there was no request to install "daemons" ???
Unless I can resolve this I will have to "downgrade" as the computer is almost unusable in this condition....shame.

Click to expand...

Thanks a lot guys for your inputs, much appreciated, especially for the "comprehensive" list of non and compatible software although I didn't find any obvious culprits so far.
The "daemons" thing I was a bit confused with was actually referring to Microsoft AU Daemon needing the installation of Rosetta...is this really necessary?
Thanks again.......

Just as a PS..managed to scotch tape over the problem for now by activating a screen saver.

If you are the 'legal' owner of all of those third party apps (CS 2 and CS3 come to mind) then I would suggest you do a clean install on this machine and install each of those apps one by one (as suggested in the beginning of this thread) until you're able to weed out the culprit.

That's quite a list there ! On the compatibility list, anything under CS4 is known to have various problems, so you might try doing those first. Lightroom 2 also has some small glitches, but they didn't say it was to the extent of what you're machine is going through.

Doug