[Malus120]

Hello all,
Several days ago I was on 3 hour domestic flight between Salt Lake City and St. Louis. I had been looking forward to using my new (1 month old) macbook during the flight, however, upon waking it from sleep, the machine began to exhibit what appeared to be disc access issues, related to altitude or perhaps pressure(?).
I had mainly planned to watch videos stored on the hard disk, some at 704396, others at 1024576. The 1024 videos played absolutely abysmally, with so much skipping, dropped frames, and long pauses as to make the video basically unwatchable. The 704 videos played better, but still had enough issues with pausing and skipping as to make the experience somewhat unpleasant (albeit watch-able).
Anyway, thinking it was some weird wake from sleep issue I restarted my machine; only to have it seemingly refuse to boot up, getting stuck at the white screen with apple logo and spinning, well, whatever you call it. I restarted several times all to the same effect (I waited several minutes each time).
Here's where things get weird. I then attempted to reboot into Windows XP and lo and behold, in very limited testing (I watched one 50 minute 704*396 video), it seemed to work just as it should, with no skipping, pausing, or dropped frames.
I then tried rebooting into OS X again, and realized that it WILL boot it just took like 3 minutes to get past the white apple logo screen and another 2 minutes or so after that. While I was able to use OS X, it still had the same issues as before, and I further discovered that the larger the video file the worse the problems got (iMovie was completely unusable with DV video).
Anyway, as soon as I got on the ground, I woke the macbook up, and, to my relief(?) it worked fine with no issues. Now, while I'm not so worried about my return flight to Portland (St. Louis-Salt Lake-Portland), I am flying from Seattle to Japan in about a week and a half and, considering its a 10 hour flight, would like to get this sorted out by then.
Some further notes:
ALL of the videos I attempted to play work fine under better battery life settings when running from battery power under normal conditions.
I tried the videos (and iMovie) in both better battery life and better performance modes during the flight. While the better performance mode did seem to help a little bit (especially with smaller files), it didn't really alleviate the problems.
I had near a full charge when I started the flight.
I did leave the computer in sleep mode when it went through security, and it went through the first 1 hour flight without being opened.
I flew on Southwest Airlines at about 30,000 feet.
I will be flying on United to Japan.
I have upgraded from the stock 80GB Hard Drive to a 160GB Western Digital.
Other (relevant) Specs; 2Ghz Core 2 Duo Macbook, 2GB Ram, latest revision, 1 month old.
Any help/thoughts/etc would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance, and sorry for being so long winded.

[MacCheetah3]

Hi
Unless it is a terrible pilot -- the cabin pressure is manually controlled from the cockpit for commercial airliners -- than the pressure should not be an issue. People have been using portables in commercial aircraft for quite some time and the environment within the cabin is usually not that far off of regular.
The only thing that comes to mind off hand being that it worked fine under Windows and not in flight would be...
Apple Knowledge Base Article #300724 - Sudden Motion Sensor: Advanced Tips
It's something to try anyway.

[RogueCrew]

Quote:

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People have been using portables in commercial aircraft for quite some time and the environment within the cabin is usually not that far off of regular.

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Well, by Regulation, it could be as low as the air pressure at 8,000' ASL. Not dangerously low, but perhaps uncomfortably low.

[fspeirs]

I had a similar symptom at ground level. Restarted my MBP after downloading and installing latest batch of Apple updates and got the spinning grey wheel. It ran all night.
Took it into my local dealer and he restarted it in safety mode (hold Shift key down), then went into disk utilities which found some library issues. Those were fixed and it runs fine.
Might be worth a try.

[MacCheetah3]

Hi
I'm sure they try to keep it as close as possible. Some pilots seem largely better than others at adjusting it.