The curious case of the frozen Snow Leopards
Eleanor Spenceley Now I have a 'spare' very old white MacBook (circa 2006 Core Duo) capable of running up to 10.6 Snow Leopard which I thought would be a perfect starter machine. Something I can see if they get on with and if they showed interest, we can find something else more powerful later.
After I dusted down my MacBook (called Smoothie), I powered it up to configure their new account, however within 5 minutes of running the machine, it froze with a ‘Spinning Beachball of Death’ (SBOD). I rebooted and again within a minute this time the SBOD appeared again. Hmm… bad Hard drive, hardware or corrupt software I thought, not to worry, I’ll start my other black MacBook (Vroomfondel), copy over the software to a spare hard drive. Again within 5 minutes, Vroomfondel had frozen with a SBOD! Nooo! Not two old MacBooks failures how unlucky is that? They are nearly 10 years old so well past their prime, but not to worry my other White MacBook (Core 2 Duo, 2008 called Speedy) will help. So I rigged up Vroomfondel put it into target drive mode and copied over the software from it to an external drive. I then booted Speedy on the external harddrive and nooo! Speedy is also showing the SBOD…. Now I know Speedy is not in great shape and not expected to last much longer, so I put it down to bad hardware number 3. After much googling, my assumption that it is hardware, hard drive or corrupt OS remained, therefore MacBook (Aluminium, 2008, Core 2 Duo) number 4 from ebay arrives and runs El Capitan without issues except it is slow with only 2GB. But once I boot it up with Vroomfondel’s 10.6 copy on the external hard drive the SBOD appears once again… So where are we? Bad external drive or corrupt 10.6? Time to reinstall a fresh 10.6 on another external hard drive. Once again, the SBOD reappears but this time a short while after ‘registering with Apple’… Okay… how about 10.6.8 and no registering?
Now that worked for a while until I connected to my WiFi network… Hmmm… Network issues? Surely not!?!? Has Apple done something with 10.6 which prevents communication with the world outside? Are there insurmountable security issues which blocks 10.6 on the internet? Surely not? But what else could have changed? Back to Google and eventually I find this: http://www.mac-help.com/threads/macbook-freezes-up-on-internet.220737 pointing to ‘new’ IPV6 network address protocol on some routers being an issue…
What?!? Yes! I changed my router just 3 months ago to superfast broadband… So after turning off IPV6 on Vroomfondel I find the SPOD has gone when using the internet… Similarly Smoothie and Speedy with the external drive are all now working! My faith in old Apple products has returned and my Macbook family are all happy once again!
So what’s the point of this long rambling story? Don’t give up on your old hardware too soon? The priceless importance of Googling for information? Old Macs are so much fun? Well.. just perhaps I now know something new about Macs that I did not know yesterday and perhaps so do you too! ;-)
Time to hand over Smoothie to a new Mac user and give it one last run out before a well earned retirement.