How to diagnose a frozen Mac

Question

When I woke my MacBook this morning, it was frozen. The screen came on, but it didn't respond to keyboard, touchpad. I forced a shut down by holding the power button. Is there a log file or set of diagnostics I can use to determine what was happening before it froze?

Answer 1

You might be able to find the root cause of the freeze in the Console application. You can find it in /Applications/Utilities.
Take a look at the system.log on the left-hand side and scroll through the entries to a time when the freeze occurred.
Hopefully you find something that points you in the right direction.