MacBook Pro: Colors and Crash From Sleep

[Alan_Arkin]

Hi there... I am hoping someone has some idea about this strange problem with my MacBook Pro (2.16 ghz, 2 gigs ram, 256 vram, 100 gig 7200 rpm hard drive). It is only 3 days old, my first one replaced after 1 day due to a dead pixel in the center of the screen.

Anyway, a good number of times (not every time), when I wake the computer up from out of sleep, there are colors on the screen moving and shaking. It ultimately freezes and I have to restart the computer. 1 time it did not reboot, but since then it reboots after fine. Still, this is disturbing on such a great computer...

I took a pic of the screen from my cell phone. Here it is... any ideas?

 

[apunkrockmonk]

If you returned it for a dead pixel (which I defintately would've done) I think the best option for this problem would be a return as well.

Looks like the GPU may be messed up.

 

[PuNkErX]

Hey,

That is really interesting, I had the same problem on my Dell 9300.

I never figured out why it did it, because it happend very rarely but it still happend.

if you can easily reproduce this problem, then I would try a few things. I would try a re-install of OS X. and if that doesn't do it, then I would ship it back.

I re-installed Windows, drivers, etc on my Dell and the problem went away as far as I know (it might have still been there but it never happend again), so maybe it will work on yours.

Good luck and keep us posted.

 

[Alan_Arkin]

I am going to take it back to the Apple Store this afternoon. It happens pretty frequently when I wake it from sleep (in the span of the 2 days I have had the Macbook). I already had OS X reinstalled on it. I also noticed a weird instance in Quicktime with some weird colors and a crash, so I am concerned it might be a hardware issue. Hopefully, the third time will be a charm. It is mildly frustrating to transfer stuff over and have to bring it back.

 

[Alan_Arkin]

As an update, I brought the computer back to the Apple Store. The manager I met noticed that it seemed like the fans were on even though the computer had been asleep for a while and nothing was happening on the activity monitor. He suspected there was a problem with the VRAM and exchanged the computer. When he swapped in the extra RAM from the previous computer it failed on startup (there is a blinking light by the latch). He put in new RAM and everything works great now. He suspects the bad RAM may have fried something inside that was causing all of the weirdness. Either way, I am starting to feel like this MacBook Pro (my third) is going to stick. (Knock on wood).