Macbook Pro keeps restarting and QuickTime Player opening

[PhilipChild]

My Mac works fine for the majority of the time. However, about once a week it will be working fine, and then the screen will go black, remain black for 5-10 seconds, then my desktop will reappear but with a blue screen and all of the programs closed, then my desktop wallpaper will reappear, and then about 10 seconds later QuickTime player will open itself. After about 5 minutes the process will repeat, but only ever happens 3 times in a row. Any advice on how to fix this problem?

Thanks

[davidchristmass]

Well, you clearly have a display crash, that is the first observation. The second point to notice, is the reappearance of the screen, with the setting in a different state, ie programs closed, and quicktime play open. You say its a once a week occurance, roughly?

First off, it would be sensible to do a keyboard check, false keys and all that? Pull the keyboard control panel up, and give all the characters and keys a good pressing, any sign of errors? I doubt, but first point of check.
I don't immediately consider this a hardware problem, it is too regular in behaviour. I consider this to be a software problem, with settings. Maybe two operating systems, or two extensions like carbon lib, and classic, it crashes out of on level into the upper layer, which has different configuration preferences.

I think you should be looking at pre ram areas. When was the last time you change the preram battery back up? When was the last time you installed software?

When it reboots, is there any sign of loss of data, ie date set to the wrong time? If you have the Date control panel set to look for network server time, you will never know the date is being lost, or the preram is lost its configs. So change that to not look at network time, look at local time, by switching network time setting off.

It also seems strangely indicative of a quicktime problem, perhaps a temp file, hidden somewhere, left over from a last incident? I think the best thing to do, after you have ensured you have a new battery, would be to back up the data first. Clear the os boot partition and do a fresh reinstall of the os from scratch. What this will do is clearly indicate to you, for sure, whether the fault is rectified, or still present. Obviously that is a massive task, but in the long and short of things, you need to find out whether the problem is hardware of software. Doing a refresh install, after a pre ram battery replaceme might solve your trouble, doing a fresh reinstall of quicktime, might again, solve the problem. But for sure, if you still have difficulties, to do diagnostics, by trashing preferences files, and hidden files, is something you either know, and can do, or can't. Things like carbon lib, occur in different regions, ie say you installed your os for US, then did an international install of QT, you might find two Carbon lib pref files. Maybe, you did a reinstall, selecting US at one time, then some other region, as a refresh. In any case, Carbon lib switching can cause that kind of behaviour. And of course you will have done a desktop rebuild. It really does sound to me that you are crashing through system layers, till you finally find the top layer. When you get stability, on the system, after a basic reinstall. The you can consider, and decide, whether to just restore the backed up data to the clean disk.

My odds favour a preram battery incident, first, a quicktime incident second, and a os system layer confusible third.

[davidchristmass]

And as an adendum, I got to say, you MUST do a Quicktime uninstall first, and then do a Quicktime install over, when you update, does that sound the most likely thing you altered before the troubles began? Preram battery check is a routine event, after usually 3 years of not knowing about its existence. If all this sounds like too much messing, and you don't have time, get on to Apple and they will give you a price to do the complete service check and sort the event out for you. After all that is what they are there for.

Give that a go, and good luck.

[Turboladdade]

davidchristmass, your posts make very little sense in the world of Mac OS X. CarbonLib was an extension for Mac OS 9, it is not something that is enabled/disabled/installed/removed from Mac OS X, and neither are there "Control Panels" in Mac OS X, and it's called PRAM not "pre" ram and very few things rely on that any more so I doubt that has anything to do with it. I'm also not sure what your bent on network time is, millions of Macs use it without any issue. You also cannot "uninstall" QuickTime from Mac OS X - it's integrated at the operating system level. And reformatting and reinstalling the operating system seems a drastic step to jump to so quickly.

More appropriate questions to ask would be:

• Which model of MacBook Pro is this and what version of Mac OS X are you running? You can find this information by going to the Apple menu -> About this Mac
• By screen going "black" do you mean the computer is restarting? Do you hear the startup chime? Drives doing their initial checkup?
• If you manually restart your computer yourself, does QuickTime start up automatically?
• If it does, check that QuickTime or some QuickTime movie isn't set to open automatically in System Preferences -> Users & Groups. If if is, remove it from the startup list.

Alternatively, try creating a new user account in System Preferences -> Users & Groups, logging out of your account and into that new one and try using it for awhile and see if that changes anything. This way we can determine if this problem is specific to your user account or is system-wide.

[davidchristmass]

Goodday Turboladdade,

Sure, X has a different mechanism in operation to 9, and some version of X of course run with what you know to be Classic, and what is in effect, Mac OS. Ostensibly the finder operates as a peer level to other applications
on X, but in some versions of X that were earlier, life for example Puma, the dependacy, of PRAM, sets ordinance over things like startup disk control panel, and a confusible in that arena depends largely on preferences, set about the PRAM area.

As for the startup check, you call to question as the computer restarting, ie startup chime, you are refering to the POST checks, which are hardware, which is why I mentioed, to check the keyboard key to ensure, something in that area is not erronous, especially as the computer is ostensibly portable.

In a world of X your advice seems to cover some very good points I may have missed, in making a more broad over approach to the question, and I, agree, with your point about a reinstall, and am really lothed to advise to do reinstalls at all, honestly, but for that, it is the only true means by which, one can deduce an intermittent problem is due to configuration settings, or some other event with absolute certainty.

Although Quicktime, you advise, is installed with the Mac OS, upgrades are issued all the time by Apple, and I have seen problems of this type occur, when quicktime is called and has not been correctly installed after an update.

I said, un-install quicktime, using an the uninstall feature of any QT upgrade package, the user might have made, because, in that way it removes all files and preference settings, (many of them hidden from the end users knowledge for security), pertaining to quicktime, from the system. That way, you know that quicktime is not installed, in any part of your system, before you advance to make corrective measures, and the uninstaller truely cleans, every aspect of knowledge of QT's being, so when you reinstall, quite rightly, as you say with the version that exists on your original disks, not an upgrade, the excess baggage from any upgrades, won't exist on your OS to cause problems. Then you can approach, doing any further update, once you are satisfied, your system is stablised. But you are going to now say, the computer is set to upgrade itself as an automated process, and the user now plays no part of that task! In which case, you won't have a deinstall function, what so ever, which comes back to the horrid task of starting right over from scratch.

Sure, its true Quicktime is integral to all Mac OS's, and not just the X ones, and the OS seems in some instances to be dependant on its running well, for performance.

My point about network time, is unclear, true, what I mean is the setting that controls where the computer obtains information about Date Time and location. This is (pre- ram, parameter ram, PRAM, or preference ram) what ever you prefer to call it, and is ostensibly dependant on the battery backup being good, if that fails, that area of settings can alter things to who knows what state of play, not just for Macs but for any computer. So, by NOT calling the date and time from the NETWORK server, BUT from the settings stored on you computer, locally, its a quick and obvious way of discovering is PRAM settings are in fact being lost due to the battery back up running flat. If the Date and time get lost, then its a sure indicator that battery backup is causing a loss of storage to the PRAM setting.

I am sure you well know the consequences of having files stored, with erronous dates and times, in world where people automate everything without thinking, information can easily become overwritten, and lost, due to an exact error in backup of a date other than the correct one.

I did not make the assumption the question invited comment on a version of operating system, as it was non specified. What I did, was advise of the general areas of the users mac to explore to resolve the issues he experiences. (I gave the guy the credit of being able to discern that he had not put QT in a startup folder, or set the QT prefs to auto startup.)

Thanks for your futher advise on the X OS part of the issue, there is not problem specific to my user account, or system wide: I simply don't use any part of Mac OS X on an Apple Mac computer, I consider the X bit of Apple an insult to its original designers that saw the way there would be a future for us all, without an X.

What you know as Classic, is quick slick and efficient, and respectful in size, and I prefer the way it operates to the larger system.

This message came to you over the air, from 9600 baud in the UK! if you can achieve that kind of network efficiency on bandwidth using X, or for that part, configure your communication link manually with the tools of your OS and with the your Telephone Network provider, yourself, not using software provided a dongle disk, I would be happy to discuss the matter further with you, but as X remains so large, and all aspects of the other kind of Mis Spent operating system of a similar size appears so incompatible with the bandwidth of communications, that faciliity won't be available in future versions of operating systems. And you'd be a better fellow than its creators, at Apple, for seeking a more efficient use of networking, than exists on it.

That my friend is the horrid horrid truth. The worlds big, and world demands for efficient networking are immense. Its not a you or I thing, who can't cope, its a structural thing of constraint, in the centre.

[kriegvision]

The OP said he's running a MacBook Pro. Therefore, he is neither running Classic nor Puma. Why are you posting so many long irrelevant rants all over the place? Mac OS 9 has literally nothing whatsoever to do with this topic. See Urban Dictionary: Thread Hijacking.

[davidchristmass]

I agree entirely, and therefore, taking your point about the absence of 9 on the thread, apart from trying to assist a posting from a Mac user, I personally can't see any purpose of trying to support or attempt to twist the thread from its original course of enquiry, so you answer the original question, Why on Mac X does the his OS crash intermittently 3 times, and pull up Quicktime? I won't waste my time or effort trying to address any further lines of things to look for.

[leonAzul]

My Mac works fine for the majority of the time. However, about once a week it will be working fine, and then the screen will go black, remain black for 5-10 seconds, then my desktop will reappear but with a blue screen and all of the programs closed, then my desktop wallpaper will reappear, and then about 10 seconds later QuickTime player will open itself. After about 5 minutes the process will repeat, but only ever happens 3 times in a row. Any advice on how to fix this problem?

There are a couple of tools you can use to gather evidence.

"Console.app" can be used to view logs of system activity. Of particular note would be Crash Reporter. Make note of the times when this occurs and check for reports at or around those times. The System logs and general Console logs can also offer clues.

"Activity Monitor.app" can be similarly used. To create a baseline report, launch "Quicktime Player.app" while it is behaving normally then launch "Activity Monitor" (this is most easily done with "SpotLight"). Select the Quicktime Player process and save a report, taking particular note of open files and the parent process. (Use the Help menu for more detail on how to do this.) Open a movie of known quality and create another report. Finally, when this happens again, immediately launch "Activity Monitor" and create another report. You can now compare the states and hopefully identify any rogue files or processes. Suspects include network data streams that weren't properly closed, errant entries in the cron tab or startup items, or corrupted files that cause the CPU to overheat and force a restart, but follow the evidence.