Constant Crashing For Mac
Complete system crashes are some of the hardest problems to isolate as so many things could be the cause. Lets work though some of the things I saw in your question: You speak of a white powder internally. Your system should be as clean as possible internally.
This is either something that got in or is dust buildup. In either case it should be removed. Open the system again disconnect the battery and using a soft paint brush and some can'ed air carefully dust out your system. Pop the memory modules and blow out the connectors you don't want to put anything in as you could snag one of the contacts. Once the system is fully cleaned put things back together. Hopefully you have a friend who has a Mac.
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Working with him create a USB flash drive with OS-X on it so it is bootable (FYI: it can be OS X 10.7.x or newer). Make sure it is able to boot up his system by holding the Option key to get to the boot manager screen and selecting the USB drive. If it worked shut down his system and reboot your system under it. Unlike before when you opened Disk Utility from your own HD here we are going to open it from the USB drive copy and run the repair options for both the permissions and the disk.
Djay unveils an apple watch remote mixer, djay pro for mac. Th really need to do it this way to effect the repair. OK, next thing here is making sure your drive has enough free space. As you didn't tell us what you use for apps other than Safari and Firefox web browsers I can't tell you if you are running into space issues. As a general rule of thumb you should have about 1/3 of free space on the bootable volume. You might want to run a cache & log cleaner to delete old cache and log files like.
Before you clean out the logs make a copy of the system log as it might have some useful info. You might need to run a HD disk defragmenting program like as well. So far we've covered the basics: Now we need to look more deeply.
Are you getting any errors reports from the OS? If so start saving them It's possible you have an app that has a memory leak or is just misbehaving. Reviewing the logs you should hopefully see a common pattern. Be careful here as you can't always tell if what is failing is the root cause or just the item that was forced to fail. You talked about running Temperature Gauge Pro and its just outside of the average range. That is likely the dust buildup that hopefully is now cleaned out. But what is important is the fan running and running within the correct RPM.
You haven't installed any fan over-ride software have you? Hopefully not. If so you should remove it and let the SMC services do its job.
If it is reporting high heat or the fan is not able to cool the system then we need to address the cause. For now lets focus on the HD & the apps. The last thing here is the memory modules them selves. Crashes that the OS does not report an error as the OS fully crashed out often are caused by modules that are failing.
You may want to see if you can get a new set and since you have only 4GB of RAM you might want to think about making the investment of getting some larger modules (8, 12 or even 16GB or RAM). Thanks for all these, Dan! I've cleaned, and run Disk Utility from my HDD clone as a startup disk. All permissions have been repaired now. I've also verified the disk, all fine. Re: free space, after the clean-install (I didn't migrate anything to the newly formatted HDD) I've only used about 10% of the total disk size (it's a 500GB HDD) - it was still crashing.
As a side note, I work a lot with graphics, sound and video. Thanks for your cache&log cleaning instructions - I'll do this if the crashing starts again. And now for the deeper look: I am getting error report from the OS, but I don't know how to read it. What would tell me that there's a memory leak?
And if there is, wouldn't my Memory Cleaner be showing that there is a memory leak (wouldn't it suddenly plummet upon opening an app)? Also, how do I know that my fan is running with the correct RPM? And, no, I haven't specifically installed any fan-override software - but doesn't TG Pro provide a fan-override function as well? Yes, a memory leak tends to ramp up the in use amount of memory a given app is using.
I use Apple's Activity Monitor app which you have in the utility folder to monitor this. A memory cleaner app is not really designed to catch this. The bigger issue here is the crashing by a misbehaving app or a bad memory segment in one of your RAM modules. As to the fans RPM: Temperature Gauge Pro will tell you whats up. As to using TGP fan over ride control I don't use it! One of the problems I tend to see is people mis-using this (killing their system).
It is so rarely needed, yet to often used! A healthy system even with the heaviest load in a normal work environment shouldn't need any alteration of the fan control. Hi Dan - I did clean the dust/powder the moment I saw it (when I opened it the first time), and the system was better for a while but not for long. Now, I've just gotten home (to my stationary desk where I have an external monitor), so it's plugged into the monitor. I didn't use my laptop at all for 2 days - I turned it on yesterday, and did quite an extensive facebook page work (uploading pictures and rearranging them, which usually crashes the system in no time) with no problem at all. I shut it down when I was finished (usually I would just put it to sleep). This morning I started again and I've been working for around 6 hours doing the same thing, still no problem until now.
I just remembered that I haven't monitored the RAM usage for a while so I turned on Memory Clean, and found that almost 4GB of RAM was used (only around 20MB RAM was left) with no problem! The system speed was just like normal. Maybe I have a solution! My Mac started doing the same thing a week ago.(its a late 2011 pro 15' 4gb ram, 250SSD HD) Nothing worked out: cleaning the inside with air (it needed it thought) Hardware test, SMC + PRAM reset, Onyx cleaning etc.
And the mac just passed out. It was hot when it happened and when it started crashing, it did it more and more until I let it cool down.
Constant Crashing For Mac 2018
SOLUTION: But two hours ago I installed Mac Fan Control and told it to react when the CPU core is above 50 and cool 100% when its above 60. I have had it on for two hours, tried to watch Netflix, using Logic (recording software) etc and it hasn't crashed! So maybe thats the solution (of cause with slightly more noise, but think I will have to get a new can of compressed air and then blow into the room between the motherboard and the keyboard. A tight and dusty place I think.) And I paid 18000kr back then (2700$) so what ever can make it work!:) hope it helps!
Constant Crashing For Macbook
All the best Morten. @Morten - Fan control software has its up sides and down sides. The newer stuff is better than what we had a few years ago, but, even still I'm a bit wary, as using them also tend to mask a problem like what you are encountering here which over time could kill your system. You started off in the right direction cleaning out the dust but the one area you forgot was to reapply a fresh coat of high quality thermal paste on the CPU & GPU chips and make sure the heat sink is working correctly.
I would start off by removing what you installed for software (some conflict) and use a good sensor monitoring app like this one:. That way you can see more clearly what area is over heating and if the fans are running correctly. The two areas I've seen issues is the heat tube loosing its coolant and the fans not working correctly besides bad heat transfer due to old or bad thermal paste.