wierd problem, maybe related to overheating.

[¥atter]

alright so my almost brand spanking new aluminum unibody macbook 13.3" computer seems to have this really wierd problem, it will occasionally(read after about 10-20 minutes of game playing) become totally unresposive after playing a sound that is similar to a series of clicks... now i have no idea what is wrong, but it seems to be when the cpu is in high use, however sometimes the computer experiences the same problem but without playing the sound, and sometimes it does it while like reading forums, or typeing up word documents... any ideas? i googled around but nothing seemed to fit.

[eska]

How many clicks are there?

[Da BomB]

Do you have an iTouch/iPhone by any chance?

there is an app that you can run that shows your processes there, so when it happens you can see whats going on....

[Radical_Pi]

If possible, hook up an external monitor and dual-screen the computer. Play games on one screen and keep System Monitor (I think that's what it is on mac, correct me if I'm wrong) up on the second screen. When the computer goes unresponsive, note anything that changed dramatically since you started playing

[Da BomB]

Yes you can, but that second screen cna only be viewed, nothing cna be done to it.

[Radical_Pi]

That's the point. You just want to see the computer's status

[¥atter]

alright, so i opened up terminal and activity monitor, and the monitor said nothing was fishy, however in terminal one of the times a message popped up saying that the keyboard/trackpad had been removed...

[Radical_Pi]

kernel panic perhaps?

Open up Applications/Utilities/Console. Click on the Logs button at the top of the window, open the folder /Library/Logs and click on panic.log. If the item at the bottom seems to match with one of your freezes, post the text of that section here. Otherwise. open system.log (it should be on the root level of the logfiles) and try to get the computer to freeze. Copy down anything new that shows up in the file as the system fails.

If you don't see anything in the window shown, as soon as you reboot the computer, open up Console and scroll up to the system boot. You should be able to find it when there is a University of California and a bunch of copyright dates. If you get to "SystemStarter: Startup Complete", you've gone too far. Look for anything that seems error-ish and post it.

if you don't see anything there, I guess you're out of luck

[¥atter]

nothing happened in console or terminal during the freak out this time, and it made the clicky noise(its like 4ish clicks btw)
but upon restart there was "Aug 10 17:49:20 Macintosh com.apple.launchctl.System[2]: BootCacheControl: could not fetch 305860 bytes of history: Invalid argument" in the console, which was the only error like thing i could see in there.

[Radical_Pi]

That looks like a side-effect of the unclean shutdown.

My last suggestion is to check for any driver updates. After that, I'm totally out of ideas

EDIT: actually, when the computer is about to fail do you hear a change in the fan speeds? Also, is this an instant freeze or a decline in performance until it freezes?

[¥atter]

drivers are up to date by the way
there is no noticeable change in fan speeds. and its an instant switch, it goes from working to the click noise and its down.