What is causing random system freezes on MacBook Air (1304)?
I went to an apple certified reseller, and the technician there did a check up on my macbook air. All the hardware seemed to be O.K. with the 'MRI' system check they did. After that he did an extended harddrive test with Disk Warrior and it froze up. So his conclusion was a broken SSD. He said replacing an SSD costed €700 ex. labor.
At home I cloned the SSD to an external harddrive using Carbon Copy Cloner, and removed the SSD from the macbook. Then I booted using my external harddisk via USB. Guess what? It still froze up. I also had a bootable USB and triple checked, again it froze up. So my conclusion is that the SSD must be fine. The apple technician drew his conclusions too quickly.
Since then I have put the SSD back in, and it seems to run more stable than before (weird). It doesn't freeze up every 2-5 minutes, rather it freezes up every 30min - 7 hours (top 7 hour heavy use without a crash). So I'm back to zero.
The problem is i'm having random freezes inside Mac OSX Mountain Lion 10.8.2. and there doesn't seem to be any particular program causing the crashes. Sometimes it's idle, sometimes its when I open finder, sometimes when I open the lid and it comes out of sleep...
Update
Unknown problem, it's not the memory either.
I do have a "solution";
I have installed kext files/drivers from within OSX Latitude E.D.P Version #4 (Rev: 71) for a Dell Dual Core based laptop (Configure Kexts, dsdt and plists) on my Macbook Air. The keyboard backlight and sound doesn't work anymore, but atleast there are no crashes. Everything else works. I wonder what is wrong.
Why does a default OSX Mountain Lion installation make the laptop unstable? And some third party drivers and configured plists that are not designed for this laptop, make it stable?
Update 2
I did the oven trick. Put the logic board in the oven for 7:40 minutes on 180 degrees Celcius so the cold solder joints could be fixed, so far so good. Here are some pictures of the proces: http://sphotos-f.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak... http://sphotos-d.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak... http://sphotos-h.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak... http://sphotos-b.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak... And after putting it back together: http://sphotos-d.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak... I'll report back in some time.
As you can see I wrapped foil around the logic board and left two spots open, for the CPU and GPU, because I was suspecting those to have bad solder/cold points. I hope the fix lasts for some time or even a long time, if not, I will repeat the process, but a little higher temperatures. But no rushing, it's running fine at the moment!
Update 3 Fixed!
Still running stable after the motherboard was put into the oven. See update 2 for details.