My MacBook Pro keeps freezing

Vulpine

I have the last-but-one MacBook Pro, released late 2008, with the unibody design. It's a rather lovely laptop and I'm very fond of it. However, having been trying to play Fallout 3 in Boot Camp, a rather annoying fault seems to have developed: sudden, system-wide freezing necessitating a reboot.

At first I thought this could possibly just be a Fallout bug, and tried reinstalling to little success. I then rebooted into Mac OS X, and played several graphically-intensive games with no freezes - until I wandered off to have some lunch, and returned to the screensaver frozen solid. Looking on Console.app, it had been for two hours.

The pattern seems to be that it only freezes when running on the 9600 dedicated graphics: Boot Camp can only use this, and not the integrated 9400, and the system was using the 9600 in OS X when it froze mid-screensaver. Under the 9400 in OS X, everything seems peachy swell.

And so to the question: does anybody have any advice, or has had any similar experiences? I could take it to Apple, although that would necessitate a few expensive journeys to get to the nearest Apple Store, and the nature of the problem is difficult to reliably reproduce. I've tried most of the usual tricks: zapped the PRAM, reset the SMC, updated drivers Windows-side, and so on. OS-wise, I'm using 10.5.8 and Windows XP SP3.

The Doctor

Maybe take it to some one to get the fans cleaned.

Szechuanosaurus

Yeah, could just be the gpu overheating. You do have it sitting on a flat solid surface when you use it? Not on a soft surface like bedsheets or your lap or anywhere that other stuff might be obstructing vents or airflow under the case?

Vulpine

Thanks for the replies. GPU overheating was certainly a thought of mine, so over last night I ran Unreal Tournament 2004 in spectator in a series of botmatches. Upon waking, it was still happily gibbing away. Throughout the rest of today, it's been fine, even as I conspicuously used the 9600 a lot more than I ordinarily would. The only game currently exhibiting problems is Fallout 3, and the crash during the screensaver cannot be reproduced.

I've been keeping it on a flat wooden desk when gaming, so airflow ought not to be a problem. I think I'll chalk this one up to Fallout being odd, and the random crash to being simply something that ought not to have happened and yet did.

Szechuanosaurus

I think fallout 3 is quite prone to crashing on the pc anyway.

opium43

I'm experiencing this exact problem. I'm running a June2009 15" Macbook Pro (2.8, 4gb, 7200). Symptoms are identical & like you, the problem only occurs when running the 9600gt. My problem manifests itself primarily when running 3D software like Maya or sketchup; however I have run into the problem in exposé and Safari (both are using the graphics card). The problem is non-existent under the 9400 integrated.

Yesterday, under sketchup this occurred and I let it hang for about 5 minuets, at which time the screen displayed some severe artifacting, indicating to me - unequivocally - that the problem is the video card. I had been monitoring temps and nothing in the system would rise over 80∘C which as far as I know is normal.

I called apple to discuss the problem and obviously this was a painful process. They recommended I run the hardware diagnostic tool they bundle with the OS. It found nothing. This whole scenario worries me as it is a problem I cannot reliably recreate and so there's no way a tech is gonna find anything. I am still in the process of dealing with them and will let you know of the outcome.

Phlogios

Any news? I've had the same problem since december 2008 and there's no solution yet. I tried maxing the fans with SMCFanControl, and placing the computer on a block of ice and it still overheated after a minute in Counter-Strike: Source.

joshua1

I have been researching this problem extensively, due to a simmilar problem in Vista with my 2009 MBPro. I had temporary freezes, 5-15 seconds long, which made gaming impossible.

Maxing out the fans is a good place to start, but from what I understand the problem has to do with the 2 graphics cards self limiting their own voltage on the fly, causing some serious issues.

What has been reported to fix this is to "force on" the low or high voltages via a 3rd party program called RivaTuner.

This should be all that you need, and there is a link in the first post to an Apple Support discussion thread with more info.

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=54536

For me, it turned out that input remapper was my problem in the end, as it was not properly supported with the new bootcamp and vista, so urning that off solved my problems and I haven't had to fiddle with drivers since.

As always, there is a huge USER BEWARE when you start over/underclocking your gear.

opium43

*UPDATE*

After hours and hours wading through apple's circular tech support trouble shooting systems I decided I would take it into my retailer whom in my city is the auth. repair agent.

I had since managed to get the problem to manifest itself reliably running on battery trying to render a flash video at full screen inside Safari. After showing them the problem they agreed that the video card was faulty and are now in possession of the system waiting for a part.

I'm not sure if this is the same problem as other people are experiencing - I'm not even sure if a new card will fix my problem. Either way I've been without a usable computer for most of this semester, which has affected my marks negatively; the repair is going to take another 2 weeks at which point I will have graduated and my need for a portable computer will be gone. I feel like asking for my money back and building an insane i7 system.