Advice needed:How do you stop Macbook from freezing due to shorts / bad power supply?
Hey Guys,
Played out another give last night with Traktor pro 1.0.2, which went great, apart from nightmare setting up.
I use a Macbook Pro 17" and when i have the power pack plugged in to the supply at the last 2 gigs the computer has frozen (shorted) - and i have to restart holding the powerbutton. Lucky this has only happened during setup or warm up, the only way to get around it is to play on battery only which has fortunately lasted for the full set.
Do you guys have any ideas on how to stop this? It hasn’t effected my other DJ’s but they seem to have the plastic macbooks, so i have no idea if it is just my computer, dodgy power pack, or the dodgy looking powerboards at the venues i have played at.
Please note, this never happens at home.
Needless to say it makes for a very stressful experience.
PRAM - Turn the Macbook on and hold down ‘Option’ ‘Apple’ ‘P’ ‘R’ The machine will re-boot itself, do this til it chimes 2-3 times
SMC - Remove the battery and hold down the Power button for 15 Seconds or more. Put the battery back in and power up the machine.
You can also check for any software updates that may fix a known issue, if these fail maybe get to a Apple Service Provider and get them to run Service Diagnostics
17" laptops are notorious for having problems with grounding. This is why time and time again I tell DJs and producers to NEVER buy a 17" laptop. The LCDs require sooo much power that the inverters are massive and that much juice runs into problems (theres even cases where people got 2nd degree burns from a screw in the bottom of a 17" dell)
Can you hear a buzz noise that comes from the charger when you plug it in? if so does it come from near the charger or near the LCD?
If you dont hear a buzz you’ve got a grounding issue in the AC system, and you might want to think about bringing a ‘surge protector’ that has an internal ground fault system.
Ground faults are DANGEROUS, especially with a 17" laptop, those things have a TON of juice going through them.
If I get this correctly, you plug in your computers power adapter into a the power strip and it freezes, almost immediately. If thats true can you be a little more detailed with what occurs before/during/after the freezing. Please be detailed as possible, like the light indicators in the battery and the power adapter, also look at the units sleep light.
I can probably help you, if your interested respond.
Hey guys thanks for the responses. I definitely think it is a grounding/spike problem. Can’t hear any audible buzzing though.
Software/firmware all up to date.
Luv2xra: The problem occurs when the power adaptor is plugged in, there are no warning indicators of any kind at all. Basically, i’d be playing on traktor, and suddenly the audio stops and the screen is frozen with no response, and i have to hold the power key down down to reboot.
The freeze has happened multiple times anywhere between 5 - 45 minutes. But as i said never at home.
I have noticed that the boards i have been plugging into at the gigs are generally chained multiple times and in poor condition.
Do you guys have any recommendation on a appropriate power conditioner / surge protector that isnt huge in size?
An audible buzz coming from your power supply isn’t necessarily caused by a grounding issue.
That’s common in many switch mode supplies and emanates from the inductor found in all switching power supplies, the changing magnetic fields actually cause the windings of the inductor to physically vibrate resulting in the hum.
If you get buzzing through the PA after the power supply is plugged in, then you need to check your grounding.
You have definitley got a power supply issue there, often in clubs you have dozens of different devices all running on the same phase wire, all connected via a web of multi-adapters and extension leads.
The devices nearly all use switching supplies which draw current in high frequency burst, because its random when each supply is drawing current compared to all the others this is generally ok, but when they all randomly ‘fire’ in phase you are going to get a large spike of current.
All the messy tangled cables have a large inductance, when you have a rapid change in the current through an inductor it actually tries to resist this change and keep the current the same, so when there is a large spike of current that has just stopped the inductance will produce a large voltage spike in the AC line which can be thousands of volts.
This can travel through consumer grade power supplies with their cheap protection circuitry and make it on to you computer mother board and through numerous methods cause the computer to crash.
Buy a decent conditioner/surge protector and you will be sweet.
Same thing happened to me last Sat during the gig, but on 15" HP Compaq. The screen just froze in the middle of the set. Very frustrating! I think I’ll need to get a UPS, because it’s definitely due to power supply and never happens at home
get a power conditioner. These do more than just protect from surges. They also compensate for dips in power (caused by numerous sources including amp spikes, cell phones, and other electromagnetic sources). Power conditioners send a continuous ‘clean’ amount of juice to your comp. I had the same problem as y’all with the freezing and loss of control… but I just played a 6hour gig with no problems thanks to my new power conditioner - absolutely no power/freezing issues. You can find a pretty cheap one from Guitar Center for about $60… Furman… they work great…
BTW - the power conditioner didn’t take away the buzzing I was experiencing. To get around that, I just got a two-prong adapter for my three-prong plug for my computer. Nothing but silence after that (at least until the music started thumping )
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