[Macpartners] Mac Diagnostic Tool Recommendations

[John Hawkinson]

Rocklyn E. Clarke Sr. <rclarke at MIT.EDU> wrote on Mon,  1 Apr 2013
at 12:59:28 -0400 in <6BAB54F2-E0CB-4D37-8BB1-F53EAAD99504 at mit.edu>:

> I have a MacBook Pro running MacOS 10.8.3 and I find that at least
> once a week my system becomes unresponsive and I need to reboot

More details would be helpful here.

What apps are running?
What is the nature of the unresponsiveness?
Does the mouse still move?
Cmd-Opt-Q/Force Quit?
Beach ball?
Does the machine ping on the network?
Does the caps lock led toggle when pressed?
How much RAM?
How old a MacBook?
etc. etc. etc. etc.

> after which I go into recovery mode and run disk utility to repair
> the drive.  Disk Utility finds something to repair at least 50% of
> the time.

This is normal and probably unrelated to your problem.
Though the details of what it reports matter -- what are they?
Frequently the OS's packing system's idea of proper file and directory
permissions gets out of sync with reality, leading to irrelevant and
meaningless "repairs."

--jhawk