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Comment by SkyMarshal | Hacker News Reader

Fwiw I can crash the entire OS by abusing tabs in Chrome. Too many tabs open => System freeze, hard reboot required. OS X Mavericks on MBPr 15".

That shouldn't be possible. Crash the browser yes, not the whole OS.

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I was also experiencing something like this. I would open lots of tabs, and at some point the machine would freeze and I would need to do a hard reboot. This got worse after installing Yosemite, where I could rarely go a day without having to reboot my system.

I was about to take my laptop in to see if it was a hardware issue when a coworker pointed me to a forum where someone suggested turning off automatic graphics switching. I did that about two weeks ago, and since then I haven't had a single occurrence of the issue. You may want to try the same thing to see if it helps.

Interesting! Wonder if it's a quality control issue with the code handling the graphics switching. Afaik, Apple engineers write custom video drivers for every supported hardware device. Wonder if Intel is now contributing more to the graphics device efforts.

Sounds like you have a hardware problem, actually. Faulty GPU or RAM, quite likely.

No, you can't single him out like this: Since Mavericks, OS crashes are very often reported, and Chrome tabs seem to be often reported as a cause. I myself have never had crashes with Snow Leopard and I see them often in Yosemite. That's exactly why we see articles reporting the Apple has lost the Quality ground.

I have exactly the same problem on multiple machines.

Plus, the wifi fiasco, over which more than one person should have been fired.

I am barely sticking with Apple for now, mostly because in startups it is the default, but I don't plan to replace my apple equipment with more apple products.

Same deal for me with Safari. No, it's not acceptable for an entire system to lockup, and no this is not hardware related.

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