First post after over 4 years of use!

May have found the cause of my MacBook freezing occasionally, usually in the winter. I think it's static electricity. Most often occurs after I've left it on and walked away to get a coffee or a pen or something and when I touch the key board to resume the whole thing freezes. The only solution I've found is a hard shutdown (holding down the power key) and restarting. Will lose anything I've been working on that's not saved but otherwise no damage. Any thoughts?

Seems like there are other more likely causes... You don't mention if the computer has gone to sleep or if it's just the screen saver that is on, but I'd suspect problems with the resume from either of those far befor static electricity assuming the case and keyboard are not damaged the case should be grounding any static discharge safely if it were hiting any of the internal components it would more than likely fry them.

That's the puzzler. The MacBook had not gone to sleep or even screensaver. It just froze where I had left it. There was no pattern, sometimes in Mail, other times Safari or in Word or Excel (for Mac!) or iPhoto. Sometimes I only had one application running, other times multiple. It's even frozen in the middle of an iTunes playlist!

Any other ideas?

What time interval is the screen saver set to. Is it possible that for whatever reason the computer freezes as the Screen Saver goes to kick in?

I would create a new user account, make sure SS and Sleep settings are the same as on your main account. Then try to recreate the freezing scenario. If you cannot recreate it in that secondary account the issue is almost certainly an issue with a preference (.plist) file in the main user account.

Screensaver set at 30 min. I think freezing has occurred in a shorter time frame, but I'll give it the test and post the results after I finish updating my month-end stuff. Thnx

just a hint... do you discharge yourself on the mac? if so.. you might want to discharge yourself before touching the mac.

I didn't worry about it before but now I try and discharge any static before I touch the MacBook. Hasn't happened since.