Mouse & Keyboard Freeze

Apologies if this has been dealt with already - but could find my specific problem anywhere.

I am running 10.7.2 on a 2.66 Intel Core 2 Duo iMac.

Quite regularly, after booting, my trackpad & keyboard have no effect with the cursor - frozen to the top left of the screen. I have disabled the trackpad and replaced with a mouse - the cusor will now move but does not respond to anything else. After several reboots or booting in safe first - it will then work but have noticed some slowness and occaisional things like - activating Safari but with no home/default page loading - same with Finder.

Hope someone can help please or point me in the right direction.

Thanks

Are you able to boot from the original install disc that came with your iMac? If so, does it appear to operate normally? How much RAM do you have, and how much drive space is used/free?

lifeisabeach said:

Are you able to boot from the original install disc that came with your iMac? If so, does it appear to operate normally? How much RAM do you have, and how much drive space is used/free?

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Hi Lifeisabeach. Thanks for your reply.

I have a 640GB drive with 140GB free and 4GB of ram. I will try the boot from original disc and come back.

Thanks

PJ

Just booted up and froze as normal - did a restart and all is working - did another restart and still working. As this a intermittent problem it is going to be difficult to confirm that booting from original is doing anything.

pjstingray said:

Hi Lifeisabeach. Thanks for your reply.

I have a 640GB drive with 140GB free and 4GB of ram. I will try the boot from original disc and come back.

Thanks

PJ

Just booted up and froze as normal - did a restart and all is working - did another restart and still working. As this a intermittent problem it is going to be difficult to confirm that booting from original is doing anything.

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Alrighty. Well the standard things to try are the Apple Hardware Test. Use the Loop Mode option.
The Apple Hardware Test

Also download Onyx and run its full suite of maintenance and cleaning tools.

Have you done any hardware upgrades yourself, like RAM?

EDIT: You should also look at testing your hard drive more thoroughly. Onyx does a SMART status check, but it relies on the drive's own reporting parameters, which from what I've read only give warnings when a drive failure is imminent. Try SMART Utility instead. It's much more thorough in analyzing SMART data and can catch failing drives sooner. They have a free demo, so take advantage of it.
http://www.volitans-software.com/smart_utility.php

If you can afford it, drop the dime for TechTool Pro. It is, hands-down, the best hardware testing suite available for the Mac.
http://www.micromat.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=202&Itemid=107

OK thanks I will set that going tomorrow night and see what results I get.

Much appreciate the help as I cannot find anyone with the same problem.

I haven't done any hardware upgrades - just software. Hope it's not Lion!! It worked perfectly well with Lion for 3 months before playing up.

PJ

Thanks

pjstingray said:

OK thanks I will set that going tomorrow night and see what results I get.

Much appreciate the help as I cannot find anyone with the same problem.

I haven't done any hardware upgrades - just software. Hope it's not Lion!! It worked perfectly well with Lion for 3 months before playing up.

PJ

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All your help was much appreciated - I tried all suggestions but to no avail. I ended up formatting the drive - doing a clean install of Lion and then migrating all my apps and docs from Time Machine. Even restored my mail which I wasn't expecting (had exported it anyway as a precaution).

Having never done anything like this I was very happy to find everything worked and the freezing problem has been cured.

The whole process took about 3 hours which is about half the time it takes to do a new install of Logic Pro 9, so also very time considerate. Spectrasonics Omnisphere also takes the same amount of time. It only took this long because of the size of my music and photo libraries.

If anyone else needs to do do this I would highly recommend Time Machine as I was even able to reinstall iDVD and iMovie which are not available with Lion. However I will also point out that if you want the same User name as before you must create a temporary admin account as TM will not import to the same name if it is active (logged in).

If you can afford it, drop the dime for TechTool Pro. It is, hands-down, the best hardware testing suite available for the Mac.

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Speaking of which... I received an email this afternoon from Smith-Micro, Tech Tool Pro is currently on sale for 50% off list. ($49.95) That's quite a bargain.