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Late 2011 model, A1278 / 2.4 GHz i5 or 2.8 GHz i7 processor.

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Frequent 1-2 second beach ball freezes every 10-20 seconds

I recently installed a new 240 GB Samsung SSD on my macbook pro. After installing, I backed up from my time machine back up. Upon reinstalling, I noticed that when using Safari or playing Hearthstone, there are very frequent freezes where the mouse shows the mac beach ball and everything on screen is unresponsive (but the sound continues).

I already tried verifying and repairing the hard drive, but the SSD seems fine. I re-installed OS X Yosemite and a clean install still has the persistent freezes.

I notice that unplugging the external monitor helps reduce the amount of freezing, which makes me believe that it is due to the graphics card in my system is flawed.

Has anyone ever seen this issue? Is it possible that I may have frayed a wire or something? I'm not a hardware expert - I was wondering if there's any obvious error that would cause this and if there's an easy fix.

Thanks!

Answered! View the answer I have this problem too

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This series has had issues with the HD SATA cable.

Here's the IFIXIT's part: MacBook Pro 13" Unibody (Model A1278 Early 2011/Late 2011) Hard Drive Cable

MacBook Pro 13" Unibody (Early 2011-Late 2011) Hard Drive Cable Image

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MacBook Pro 13" Unibody (Early 2011-Late 2011) Hard Drive Cable

$34.99

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Thanks Dan! Why would the freezing lessen when I disconnect my external monitor? I just want to make sure that it's the SATA cable before I go out and buy one.

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Create a bootable USB thumb drive then set it as the boot disk. Your system should be stable then (as long as the app is also on the thumb drive too). You could also setup a Thunderbolt drive as well here (much faster).

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For me the culprit was the "Automatically adjust brightness" as stated in this thread:

https://forums.developer.apple.com/threa...

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@hugo - Your issue is tied to the El Capitan beta bug Apple is aware of. This is a completely different issue! Note the dates in the posts (2014)

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How much RAM do you have in the MBP? The stock configurations on the Late 2011 13" only had 4GB of RAM, which is the bare minimum for Mavericks (and probably Yosemite, too). All the current generation machines come with 8GB except the base model Macbook Airs. They have much faster SSDs and drive busses than your MBP, so virtual memory runs faster and the limited RAM doesn't lead to as many slowdowns.

By coincidence, I have the same model late 2011 13" on my workbench at the moment. I just upgraded the RAM from the stock 4GB to the maximum 16GB (Apple lists the maximum as 8GB, but 2 x 8GB 1333MHz DDR3 SO-DIMMS works just fine). IT was very slow under both 10.9.4 Mavericks and Yosemite Beta 2 with the stock RAM; lots of pinwheels. After five days of bench testing, I haven't had a single pinwheel with 16GB installed.

PC3-10600 8 GB RAM Chip

PC3-10600 8 GB RAM Chip Image

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PC3-10600 8 GB RAM Chip

$44.99

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Try going back to the 4GB but before you do, clean out the old log files and other junk, then run Disk Utility to fix any errors on the drive and lastly defrag the HD. I think you'll find the system will be much faster and not need that much RAM. The reason the system appears to run better with the larger amount of RAM is the logs and index tables are taking up space within RAM and virtual RAM which slows the system as it needs to page the index tables & logs in and out of RAM in/out of V RAM.

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