Mac Os X Lion Crashes after resuming from Sleep

Question

Hi Everybody, i'm experiencing an issue on my 13'' MBP Early 2011 (i5 processor, 4GB RAM, 750GB HD SATA). My MBP often got stuc after i resume from my monitor sleep. I'll explain it in a better way: After i resume from sleep, there's at first a black screen in which the mouse can move, after that the mouse becmes the classic loading wheel and it freezes copletely, remaining in this situation. I thought it was a screensaver compatibility issue, but the problem stand still after i uninstalled screensaver and deactivate the screensaver options. I think it's a problem with Lion with the HD, but i have no evidence of it. Can Anyone help?
Thank you in advance,
Daniele.

Answer 1

Whenever someone comes to me with crashing and freezing on waking up I look at 3 things and typically in this order:
(1) Hard drive - usually if it is the hard drive SMART has already given a warning if the drive is actually failing or running Disk Utility reveals problems - often problems that cannot be fixed. Also, when the crashes are related to the hard drive there may actuallly be nothing wrong with the drive and a simple erase and reinstall will fix it.
(2) Software issues - the old trick of creating a new account and logging into it to see if the problem is in your account or global helps. Looking in console to see if there's an error message logged just before the crash can be instructive - or not. Often the crash occurs before an error is logged. Sometimes reinstalling the OS is the solution - that's where having a FireWire hard drive is helpful. I can just boot with it and see if the computer still crashes on waking. If not I know to reinstall the OS.
(3) RAM - marginal and faulty RAM can be the culprit in many cases. The frustrating thing about RAM is that RAM tests seldom give false positives, if the test says you have bad RAM, you do. Unfortunately when the test reveals nothing wrong the RAM might still be defective, just not enough for the test to catch.
However, past history has led me to put RAM at the top of the list after an OS upgrade. Marginal RAM has been the culprit of many crash on wake problems with previous OS upgrades. I especially recall Leopard and Snow Leopard being affected - at the shop where I sometimes work we did a lot of RAM warranty replacements after those two upgrades. And here at the support forum we saw lots of people complaining of crash on wake problems coming back and saying, "Yep, got my RAM replaced and all is well." So if any of you are like me and upgraded your RAM, if you have the original RAM sitting around swap it in and see if the crashes stop.