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I am looking for anyone who can answer a bizarre question for me: Can the random and frantic, almost angry and violent continuous clicking of a mouse lead to the complete shutting down of a Mac and ultimately locking the owner out of having access to the computer?
I know it sounds like a whacky question, but a newly refurbed MacBook Pro (2008-09 I think) in excellent condition running El Capitan shut down and refused to completely boot back up after a series of reboots after lockups running Chrome and accessing HootSuite. This issue happened to a co-worker who has a terrible tendency to become incredibly impatient and angry and will aggressively and violently continuously click his mouse over and over again when the computer is executing a function he doesn't think is working fast enough. Sometimes he pounds the mouse on the desktop 3-4 times. I can't help but think that this is potentially dangerous since the clicking of the mouse puts procedures in play. It would seem to me that random and frantic clicking of the mouse while waiting impatiently for a function to finish could lead to random or unexpected dialog boxes popping up and executing commands that the user might not want implemented.
When the computer completely shutdown and wouldn't boot back up/kept shutting itself down with 3/4 of the progress bar loaded, I rebooted and accessed the Disk Utilities to run first aid, where there were problems. (First Aid reported the HD "could not be verified completely. File system check exit code is 8. File system verify or repair failed". I have no idea what that means and found no explanation online.) Ultimately, I erased the drive and attempted to reload El Capitan. I could not do this as we have never "purchased" El Capitan and therefore did not have it in our Apple purchase history, and since Sierra is the newest OS available online, reinstalling El Capitan was not possible. The attempt to reinstall yielded a message saying there application was not available and to try later. No other options were presented. Of course, i was not 100% sure the OS issue was the case, after all the drive could have been damaged even though the drive was error free after the erase. In order to fully determine if the drive was OK, I was able to create a bootable flash drive with Yosemite. This worked. The install was successful and the computer is functioning again.
Obviously, it is evident that there was/is nothing wrong with the drive on this MacBook. BUT, this has left me with one big puzzle I am trying to solve. WHAT CAUSED THIS COMPUTER TO LOCKUP RUNNING HOOTSUITE & CHROME, leading to a forced shutdown to reboot the computer but NOT BOOT BACK UP? WHAT HAPPENED THAT FORCED ME TO HAVE TO RUN DISK UTILITIES, ERASE AND REINSTALL THE OS? FYI, when he launched Chrome to access our website, he chose to run HootSuite to update his Twitter and Facebook accounts and make updates. this is something he does not do very often, so this accessing of HootSuite was his first time on this particular computer. Oddly, the application asked for the user logins of past employees who did use the application BUT NEVER this computer. Since I was not a witness to any of this happening prior to trying to helping him get the computer running and it shutting down completely, I cannot say how he accessed the app, what the prompts said, and how often he may have been aggressively clicking that mouse when the login prompts from HootSuite popped up.
If anyone can shed any light on this, I would greatly appreciate it. I need to know if it is possible that someone angrily and repeatedly clicking the mouse out of frustration while the computer is running a function can cause the computer to freeze-up, locking the owner out. Or was this another strange anomaly caused by El Capitan?
I have wondered if it is possible the previous owner had forgotten to disable Find My Mac and this shutout was an issue of a security function being invoked from some place in the world, but we never got any kind of warning saying there was security issue. Even if this were the case, then I wouldn't have been able to reinstall an operating system, would I?
I am sorry this is such a long post, but the situation was very involved and, believe it or not, there just might be information I left out.
Thanks for any ideas and input. We really want to have some kind of idea what happened so we can take measures to prevent them from happening again.
THANK YOU!
I know it sounds like a whacky question, but a newly refurbed MacBook Pro (2008-09 I think) in excellent condition running El Capitan shut down and refused to completely boot back up after a series of reboots after lockups running Chrome and accessing HootSuite. This issue happened to a co-worker who has a terrible tendency to become incredibly impatient and angry and will aggressively and violently continuously click his mouse over and over again when the computer is executing a function he doesn't think is working fast enough. Sometimes he pounds the mouse on the desktop 3-4 times. I can't help but think that this is potentially dangerous since the clicking of the mouse puts procedures in play. It would seem to me that random and frantic clicking of the mouse while waiting impatiently for a function to finish could lead to random or unexpected dialog boxes popping up and executing commands that the user might not want implemented.
When the computer completely shutdown and wouldn't boot back up/kept shutting itself down with 3/4 of the progress bar loaded, I rebooted and accessed the Disk Utilities to run first aid, where there were problems. (First Aid reported the HD "could not be verified completely. File system check exit code is 8. File system verify or repair failed". I have no idea what that means and found no explanation online.) Ultimately, I erased the drive and attempted to reload El Capitan. I could not do this as we have never "purchased" El Capitan and therefore did not have it in our Apple purchase history, and since Sierra is the newest OS available online, reinstalling El Capitan was not possible. The attempt to reinstall yielded a message saying there application was not available and to try later. No other options were presented. Of course, i was not 100% sure the OS issue was the case, after all the drive could have been damaged even though the drive was error free after the erase. In order to fully determine if the drive was OK, I was able to create a bootable flash drive with Yosemite. This worked. The install was successful and the computer is functioning again.
Obviously, it is evident that there was/is nothing wrong with the drive on this MacBook. BUT, this has left me with one big puzzle I am trying to solve. WHAT CAUSED THIS COMPUTER TO LOCKUP RUNNING HOOTSUITE & CHROME, leading to a forced shutdown to reboot the computer but NOT BOOT BACK UP? WHAT HAPPENED THAT FORCED ME TO HAVE TO RUN DISK UTILITIES, ERASE AND REINSTALL THE OS? FYI, when he launched Chrome to access our website, he chose to run HootSuite to update his Twitter and Facebook accounts and make updates. this is something he does not do very often, so this accessing of HootSuite was his first time on this particular computer. Oddly, the application asked for the user logins of past employees who did use the application BUT NEVER this computer. Since I was not a witness to any of this happening prior to trying to helping him get the computer running and it shutting down completely, I cannot say how he accessed the app, what the prompts said, and how often he may have been aggressively clicking that mouse when the login prompts from HootSuite popped up.
If anyone can shed any light on this, I would greatly appreciate it. I need to know if it is possible that someone angrily and repeatedly clicking the mouse out of frustration while the computer is running a function can cause the computer to freeze-up, locking the owner out. Or was this another strange anomaly caused by El Capitan?
I have wondered if it is possible the previous owner had forgotten to disable Find My Mac and this shutout was an issue of a security function being invoked from some place in the world, but we never got any kind of warning saying there was security issue. Even if this were the case, then I wouldn't have been able to reinstall an operating system, would I?
I am sorry this is such a long post, but the situation was very involved and, believe it or not, there just might be information I left out.
Thanks for any ideas and input. We really want to have some kind of idea what happened so we can take measures to prevent them from happening again.
THANK YOU!
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