Today, I had to turn in my MBP 2.4Ghz for servicing at The Mac Group. It looks like a hardware failure, possibly in the video card. It would freeze and there would be video artifacts. When I attempt to reboot, it will often fail with what looks like a kernel panic.
Today, I managed to boot it successfully once, which allowed me to grab a few files I needed and wipe out the caches, history and passwords. I took a full system backup last weekend.
To the right is a photo of the screen showing some of the video problems. There are two blocks above and to the left of the Finder icon (the happy face icon). Most of the time, these random blocks of artifacts are much larger (up to about a third of the screen size), but I didn’t have my camera when the bigger artifacts were visible.
Once I reboot and start getting the kernel panic messages, it will continuously stop at the same place during the boot process with the kernel panic message. It’s very frustrating. Sometimes, if I just power off for a few hours, it will eventually boot (which is how I copied off the files I needed and cleaned the caches).
There is a known issue with the NVidia cards in this model of MacBook Pro, and Apple has extended the replacement policy to three years. I am hopeful that this will be shown to be the NVidia issue, which would mean that the motherboard will be replaced at Apple’s expense.
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