Hey all,
I searched a bit for this answer, but keep coming up with unrelated posts. Forgive me if this is somewhere that I can’t find the answer. I have been using scrivener for sometime and it has always frozen up from time to time. Over all, not a big deal. I need to manual shut down the machine and wait for reboot and “synchronizing” search strings. Whether it is happening more often or I am just getting a bit fed up, I am uncertain, but I wanted to see if anyone could offer any advice for this…
When it freezes my mouse won’t move and I can’t input anything via the keyboard. It happens sometimes when I shut of my trackpad. If it is helpful to know I am running it on a hackintosh msi wind netbook. In ways I imagine it will be attributed to the hackintosh, but I am hoping it is something else and I can clear this up.
Hmm, yeah my first thought as I was reading your description was that this sounds like something outside of Scrivener that is causing it. Then I read you are using a hackintosh and I felt even more that way. While it is certainly possible for an application on the Mac to totally freeze up a computer to the point where the mouse doesn’t move, these is awfully rare these days and usually happen in programs like games that are accessing the video hardware at a lower level than most applications. I’ve never seen a hard crash of that nature resulting from Scrivener, but of course that’s anecdotal so must be taken with salt. Some areas you can check for clues:
Open up the program Console.app, from /Applications/Utilities. This is a record of all messages on your system, many of them are warning messages, errors, minor exceptions and such. Each line is a separate report and comes from a program, which is identified, and when it occurred. You can use this information to narrow things down to when you had a freeze, and see if anything happened in Console around then. It may not be Scrivener so I’d broaden your search to any repeating pattern around those times.
The next place to look is your Library folder, under Logs/CrashReporter. When a program crashes “neatly” it writes a crash report into this folder. These are likewise identified by date and time and application. I’d be surprised if you have anything there though. A “neat” crash means the system is still running and a few other conditions. A hard crash that locks you completely out of the OS probably never had a chance to write a crash report.
Previous users have had issues with crashes if there is a bad/corrupt pdf file in their project. (I’m trying to think of a non-hackintosh issue.) The way to test this is to see if another program chokes on the same pdf. (There are reports of the same issues with other media files as well.)
This is true, corrupted QuickTime media and PDFs can cause application crashes. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a case where the whole system freezes to the point of the mouse not even responding, though. If you do have any PDFs or media in your projects though, it might be a lead.