@tech

My trusty 2008 Macbook Pro is still kicking.  However a week ago it started to freeze up within about 2 minutes of booting.  Oh no, is this outdated gem finally headed for the electronics graveyard?  Not so fast.  In spite of it seeming to indicate a motherboard problem, it was AT&T’s fault.  Let me explain.

I recently moved.  On top of that painful-enough-experience, I also opted to transfer our AT&T Uverse account to the new homestead, thinking that would be easier and faster than just signing up for cable internet with a new provider.  WRONG!  Following a week of mishandled everything (literally) on AT&T’s part they finally sent a tech out who not only ran new cable but told me (unlike everyone else) the modem we used at our previous address would not work with the level of service at the new address.  No one else knew this?  So out comes a new modem and suddenly we have connectivity.

The new digs also is not hard wire networked (yet) so I am resigned to depending on wi-fi for several connection points until I have time to get that accomplished.  Why hardwired you ask?  It’s faster and more secure.  Not to get overly technical here but it’s WAY faster!

After getting the critical machines connected I dig out old trusty and power up.  She worked great as usual before the move.  And was handled ever so carefully during the move, so there was every expectation she’d do the same here.  Not at all.  It would go thru the boot sequence to a login prompt.  Get thru that and successfully load the OS.  Give me enough time to launch System Prefs, or a browser, and then freeze.  Sometimes the beach ball would appear.  Other times just a blinking cursor with no mouse response what ever.

Connecting a mouse rather than using the track pad made no difference.  Booting from a recent bootable USB drive (this is a good reason to maintain such a thing) made no difference.  Connecting to the AC adapter and booting without the battery in made no difference.  Resetting PRAM made no difference.  At this point after searching online I’m beginning to fear the worst, a motherboard problem, which would signal EOL for this machine.  Yet, it worked fine before the move.  What changed?  In short, AT&T changed.  Or rather, the modem.  Searching on that revealed nothing.

So I decided to boot a few more times and see if the time it functioned normally was consistent, and to observe what was happening.  I had just enough time before it would freeze to launch System Prefs and thought I would turn off wi-fi and see what happened.  It ran.  And continued running.  Huh?  Is the wi-fi card bad and causing the system to freeze up?  Turn on the wi-fi and within about 2 minutes it froze solid.  So, apparently the freeze happens during the handshaking between the MBP and the new modem.

Reboot and turn off wi-fi.  No freeze.

In digging thru the wi-fi settings (that are still disabled) everything looked fine.  I noticed IPv6 was enabled.  I’ve never turned it off for wi-fi but have tended to keep it off on my hard wired networked machines.  Why?  The early implementation of IPv6 had some issues that on some systems would cause slow downs or just unhappy computers.  As a result I just tend to not use it.  So I switched it off on the wi-fi settings and turned wi-fi on.  Wait.  Wait.  It’s been a couple of minutes.  Wait.  No freeze.  A normally happy MPB is back and connected.

At this point I logged in to the modem and turned off IPv6.  My iMacs had not complained about this.  However I believe my MBP may predate them all and it’s likely there are remnants of the original IPv6 issues still dogging it, while the somewhat newer machines running the latest OS (unlike my way too old for Yosemite MBP) have all been updated to a newer standard.

In the end it was and wasn’t AT&T’s fault.  It’s the onward progression of technology.  As for IPv6, I’m still leaving it off.  I see no advantage to using it and no difference in the machines that handle it now.