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2.26 or 2.4 GHz / White plastic unibody enclosure

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My MacBook is frozen and it will not shut down. What's wrong?

My MacBook has been frozen for two days now, and I can't turn it off. I have tried the power button as well as command, control, and power buttons simultaneously with no result. I can move the mouse, but I cannot do anything when I try to give a command. When I push the power button, the screen goes black. And when I turn it on again, it looks like it goes to sleep and wakes up on the same screen. Any suggestion?

P.S I haven't tried to take out the battery because I'm scared maybe something worse will happen.

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model nr----A1342

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My kids got ahold to BOTH!! Macs! My IMac and MacPro....no telling what they pressed....please help! On the iMac the program's either take long to open or just doesn't open at all....the MacPro is froze the mouse pad works but can't click on anything or nothing will open but it's able to charge and sleep HELP!!!!

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I can't exit my gmail.com account - nor can I shutdown my MacBook Pro

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Chosen Solution

Start by resetting your PRAM and SMC. For instructions on how to do that click here and click here. If that doesn't resolve your problem, pull your RAM out of their slots and reseat them, then do the resets again. Please let us know the results of these things.

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Yeah I would like to do that but first I have to shut down the system. It is still frozen after have tried everything, I think.

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He's not able to clear the hang so this won't help.

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Thanks for the down vote whoever and for what? Try unplugging the magsafe, first. The battery will eventually run out of power and the system will shut down. For some reason it never occurred to me that I would need to tell someone to unplug their computer if it won't power down.

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Thank you, thank you, thank you!!! It's been frozen and ticking for an hour! It was kinda funny though - I was watching Tosh.0 w/ the Monster Satan Lady and as soon as Tosh drank the Tea Bag ice tea my mac froze and started ticking. I'm agnostic but !&&*....

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this happened to me except the the mouse wasn't moving at all. so just hold the power button for a minute or two, or until it turns off. once you have turned it back on hold shift until the apple sign shows up, safe booting. hope this helps

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Most Helpful Answer

Don't panic yet!

Did you press and hold the power button for a good minute? That should power down your system.

It sounds like you have an app or the OS in a locked state, and the only way to to get out of this is to completely power down the system and restart.

One thing you should do afterwards is to check any documents you may have had open at the time to see if they are OK.

You may want to run a virus program and a HD health check using Apple's Disk Utility program using your OS CD/DVD (or bootable USB thumb drive) to boot you system. If you can, I would also defrag the HD. You should also clean out the old Cache & Log files. Give this App a try: Disk Doctor. Make sure you have at least 1/4 of your drive free. If not, clean things up.

If it happens again, you may want to check the apps and any OS add-ons that are running at the time the system freezes up. Make sure you've got the latest and updated the OS.

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Yes I did to hold the power button and turns off(looks like go on sleep) and when it turns on again it just puts the screen at the same point frozen.

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Try again holding the power button down longer. Sounds like you weren't able to get the system to do a power shutdown and go into a cold reboot only go in and out of sleep mode. With the built in Batt this is the only way (other than opening up the system to pull the battery power connector off the logic bd)

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I try to push the power button for long time but not luck. Just turn back at the same frozen screen.

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Dedej - It's time to pull the plug!

You'll need to open the system to pull the battery connector. Haven't seen one so locked up like this, you may have other problems with the logic bd. For now try this and after a few minutes reconnect the batteries and see if it is able to restart.

If your not comfortable doing this and you have an Apple store nearby see if they can reset the system for you.

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This reallly does work my laptop was frozen and the mouse wasn't working but I held down the power button and it flashed off and rebooted! Thankyou x

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I think, after doing these steps you still have to fix the root problem. Unfortunately, this isn’t as easy as it sounds.

  • Cleaning out old files
  • Update your Apps and make sure you have updated the computers OS.
  • Upgrade your hardware if your drive is failing and/or add memory

I hope this helps

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Not sure if people are still reading this or not. But I have had this issue of the laptop not shutting down or logging off since I update to El Cap. After applying what I read online nothing worked. I decided to take a chance I delete everything out of the System Library Cache folder. IT WORKED. I can now restart, logoff and shutdown.

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oh does it really work? I had that same issue since i update to EI Capitan. Its really annoyed me for weeks and i couldn't work with my mac now

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dedej33 will be eternally grateful.
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