New 17" MBP Spontaneously Crashing - Did I Get a Lemon?

[groove-agent]

I bought a new 17" 2.6 Ghz Santa Rosa MBP in July and it's spontaneously "blue screening". Ok, Macs don't blue screen, but there's that dark curtain that falls with the message that you need to turn physically reset the computer.

This has been happening consistently for a while now. The laptop will just be sitting there idle and that curtain will fall. What the heck??

I run my MBP pretty hard. I'm wondering if it has overheated to the point of damaging something.

 

[nikhsub1]

2 things come to mind, first is heat, do you have smc fan control installed? If not you should so we can see what your temps are like. The next likely area if it is NOT heat would be RAM. Run the memory test (I think there is one in OS X) and see how that turns out.

 

[isleofjib]

are you always running it hard when it crashes? if not, i'll 2nd RAM being the likely culprit. beware tho that bad RAM doesn't always show as being bad when you run a test on it. if the shut downs are random, look at the RAM. if you have 2 sticks of RAM, you can try taking one out, running the machine and see if crashes. if it does, try putting that one back in and take the other one out. if you only have 1 stick, you'll need to get a spare stick to throw in there. good luck.