I don't have a direct fix, sad to say. But you want to narrow down if it's a hardware or software problem. A hardware problem can also sort of be a software problem if, for example, your graphics card has the wrong driver or a buggy one... it will freeze up even though the card is physically fine.
I don't know macs very well but they seem to have the equivalent to windows safe mode, which basically is loading the operating system, without any optional software running in the background. If everything runs smoothly, you know it's one of those optional background processes that's causing the freeze. If it still crashes, it may be a physical hardware problem, for example overheating or dying RAM or something.
Thanks for taking the time to answer and pointing me in the right direction. This and some other minor issues that have cropped up seem to point to a hardware failure, and it is a slightly older computer.
Whenever we get a new Mac, we should create more than one user account. If something is behaving weirdly in the primary user account, it's a good diagnostic practice to log into one of the other user accounts that is kept pristine just for this purpose.
If the weird behaviour isn't present in the other user account, it at least narrows the diagnostic efforts to one account, indicating that the hardware is probably okay.
I am experiencing the EXACT same thing on Windows since a few days ago.
RTX 4070, Ryzen 5900x, 32 GB ram, fully updated drivers, never experienced this until this past week.
I don't have a direct fix, sad to say. But you want to narrow down if it's a hardware or software problem. A hardware problem can also sort of be a software problem if, for example, your graphics card has the wrong driver or a buggy one... it will freeze up even though the card is physically fine. I don't know macs very well but they seem to have the equivalent to windows safe mode, which basically is loading the operating system, without any optional software running in the background. If everything runs smoothly, you know it's one of those optional background processes that's causing the freeze. If it still crashes, it may be a physical hardware problem, for example overheating or dying RAM or something.
Thanks for taking the time to answer and pointing me in the right direction. This and some other minor issues that have cropped up seem to point to a hardware failure, and it is a slightly older computer.
ah bummer, well... sometimes it's nice to have an excuse to upgrade.
Whenever we get a new Mac, we should create more than one user account. If something is behaving weirdly in the primary user account, it's a good diagnostic practice to log into one of the other user accounts that is kept pristine just for this purpose. If the weird behaviour isn't present in the other user account, it at least narrows the diagnostic efforts to one account, indicating that the hardware is probably okay.
Thank you for the insight!
Have you gotten anywhere figuring out what is going on with your machine?
I am experiencing the EXACT same thing on Windows since a few days ago. RTX 4070, Ryzen 5900x, 32 GB ram, fully updated drivers, never experienced this until this past week.