Hey everyone,
I'm not sure if anyone is even going to read this but I felt like I had to post what I did and it seemed to have worked. It does involve downloading the software mentioned above, but not only that. Again, it has been working up to now, a week or so of intense ProTools sessions (music recording) and other multitasking.
This is going to be a long post.
First of all, how it started: After realizing that some of the music production software could not run on Snow Leopard I migrated to Lion. A few weeks went by and then the random shutdowns started to happen. I don't recall doing anything different other than upgrading to Lion. On a desperate move I decided to downgrade back do Snow Leopard but it did nothing to the issue.
After watching some of Louis Rossmann's videos I decided to shoot him a message describing the issue, this was his reply: (it might sound harsh but Louis is actually an amazing dude, who's been assisting a bunch of people with Apple products related issues, look him up on Youtube)
+"japasetelagoas" Reballing is constantly being recommended by the dumbest of our industry, with no brain. Make sure to go back to those places where idiots suggest that and credit me with calling them an idiot.
Replace C9560 with anything but a tantalum kind. Apple made the same mistake they made with the 820-2610 and 820-2330 where they ran out of space on the motherboard for C7771 so they made it a tantalum one. This is not suitable for a rail that is always on, as C7771 is for an S5 rail - so it dies. Voltage fluctuates, and eventually the machine stops turning on. On the 820-2850, that same 330uf tantalum capacitor re-appears on the framebuffer power supply for the GPU and the VRAM. The reballers without brains are heating this capacitor when they heat the board to remove the chip, so what happens is that they think they fixed it when the capacitor works again post heating! But it dies again when the cap F's up again. The proper repair is to replace C9560 with a non-tantalum one, which won't fit! You will have to scrape the board's ground pad to make this fit. It is doable.
Well, after realizing that I had to do some SMD soldering in order to try to fix it I took the fact that I'm into electronics (have a small lab at home) and decided to buy me a hot air rework station, crucial to swap the super tiny capacitor.
Months went by and I finally came up with enough courage to either ruin my 15 inch mid 2010 MBP or fix it, but before heating up the station I thought about the software mentioned above, the gfxcardstatus, why not give it a try, I'm screwed anyways.
Downloaded exactly as described on the post above, version 1.8.1. Installed it on my MBP running Mountain Lion by the time. After installing the computer failed 2 or 3 times in between both setups, NVIDIA and Intel's GPU. I had lost my faith by the time but after setting it once again to Intel's chipset it sort of stabilized. Three hours went by and no reboots, 5 hours, I then thought to myself,
why not downgrade the OS back to Snow Leopard WHILE gfxcardstatus is set to Intel (isolating NVIDIA's chip).
That's exactly what I did, had to format the whole thing, wiped out my HD and after doing that I STILL HAVEN'T HAD ONE SINGLE REBOOT. Almost two weeks went by with constant Protools usage, Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, not a single hiccup. And before you guys ask, we all know that the gfxcardstatus sort of shuts down NVIDIA's chipset, guess what? My MBP is running exactly on NVIDIA's chipset, the one which was told to be triggering the fault.
The image below points out that the computer is indeed running on it, it even has a Protools session open and the messsage with Louis Rossmann on the background:
This is a message that I've sent to Louis explaining the things that I did:
"Louis, so something weird happened here. I haven't touched the logic board but for some reason my MBP returned to life. A day and a half have passed with extensive Pro Tools 8 sessions and not a single hiccup from the computer. I'm trying to identify any logical reason for it to be working but couldn't think of any, the best thing that I can do is share with you the things that I did prior to realizing that the computer seemed to return to an operational state. It happened on a very short time lapse so I'll just number things out:
1- Finally created the guts to take that cap off after receiving a reply from you 6 months ago.
2- Downloaded the schematic but couldn't find the damn component, sent you a message and received your reply, was confident on doing it.
3- Before actually heating up my hot air station I decided to give the "gfxcardstatus 1.8.1" software a shot, the one that lets you choose between NVIDIA's and Intel's.
4- By the time I had it installed my MBP was still running Mountain Lion (can't recall exactly what version). It did reboot a few times but then after switching back a few times between GPU's I selected the "Intel Only" option and the thing sort of stabilized.
5- A few hours went by and the Mac still hasn't rebooted, which was a relief to say the least. I then decided to downgrade the OS to the one that IMHO is the most stable for music production (Snow Leopard).
6- Did the whole thing, put the Install CD in, erased the hard drive, reformatted the whole thing. Just let me emphasize something, I did all of that whilst the "Intel Only" mode was still selected. I really can't tell you if this has any effect on the final product, if after wiping the HD the command to isolate GPU's simply reset thus ruling out any probability that this is linked to the problem being "solved".
7- Turned the Mac on, now with a fresh Snow Leopard version, installed all of my recording stuff back in, Protools 8, Waves Plugins, a bunch of VST's, still with the uncertainty that it would give me a kernel again.
8- Today 07/06, I decided to give the old Mac a shot on actual recording. Spent 3 hours recording a little project band which I'm in and it worked like a charm. Smooth, 3 different songs with 4 or 5 tracks, nothing major, the bass player didn't show up. But hey, it seems that the thing is back to life.
9- Here comes the intriguing part. I've just checked which processor is being used according to Apple's support website, and apparently, by the time I was writing this email, with a Protools session open, NVIDIA's GPU was running. Should I consider this a fix or should I get some Kleenex to wipe my tears out when this thing fails on me again? Maybe it's just plain luck that it hasn't "decided" to screw me over."
His reply was that he never saw me stating that I've replaced the capacitor, which I didn't.
I apologize for this huge post but I really had to share it, this is something that til now worked for me, I've never seen anyone mentioning that they downgraded their OS while running the gfx software, still I
can't guarantee that's going to work considering that I couldn't come up with any logic explanation as to why I still didn't get any reboots, but hey, when I was desperate thinking that I had lost my pricey computer, the first thing that came on Google I was trying it.
Hope this somehow assists people with this particular issue.