Ed’s Macbook Pro: 2008-01-22 to 2008-04-09. “We hardly knew you…”

Filed Under Apple on 2008-04-09, 16:07

The night before heading out to New York I spent a few hours transferring files and setting up things so I could just bring my Macbook Pro instead of both the MBP and my work laptop. I was sitting on the couch, closed the laptop to do something, and then came back to open it up, expecting to see it pop right back up since I didn’t have hibernation turned on. I wanted my desktop full of running apps, but instead I got a blank grey screen. The light on the clasp would ocassionally blink three times as if to mock my anger.

I shrugged and figured “oh well, I lost what I was working on, good thing I saved it.” I hit the power button to shut down and again to try to restart. No luck, just the same grey screen. The next 15-20 minutes were spent trying to control my anger and researching online to see what the heck could be going on. I found no definitive answer and eventually it just turned back on after it had been sitting for awhile.

I chalked it up to overheating since you can almost fry bacon on my laptop when it’s being used. I continued working the rest of the evening with no problems and left it charging for the long plane flight ahead.

The next day on the plane, I used the laptop, learning all about the ins and outs of “ant” (was happy to have it already installed) until the battery warning popped up. When I saw that, I smiled to myself and said “glad thing I bought that extra battery!” I closed the lid, dug the battery out of my backpack and swapped it out with the almost dead one. I opened the lid to the now familiar grey screen. I tried Cntrl+Command+Power button to reset several times, no luck. Tried closing it and letting it cool for 10minutes, no luck. Finally I gave up and stuffed the $3000 piece of crap back in my bag, wishing I had brought the Thinkpad instead.

I have no idea what’s going on. There are no error messages, no sad macs, no weird sounds (I.e. Harddrive dying), nothing to even give me a hint as to what is going on. Did it fail to hibernate correctly even though the battery was low? Even so, a pull of the battery should have wiped things out and I’d be booting to a fresh OS. Is it bad RAM? If so, I would expect to at least see an error message. Anyone have any idea what’s going on?

I called Apple Support, who were nice but couldn’t figure it out. The rep helped me even though I hadn’t registered my Apple Care yet. We went through some basic troubleshooting, i.e. turn it off, pull battery/plug, tried (and failed) to reset the PRAM (I think that’s what Command+Option+P+R was supposed to do), etc. No luck. Looks like I get to find the OS X cd when I get home and run some diagnostics he says. Either that or a trip to the Apple store.

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Comments

  • Tim
    Hey - I'm thinking you got a rotten apple *grin* - I've been using my MacBookPro 24/7 to/from work, to meetings, trips, in the air, on a beach... It's never let me down yet. I've only gotten a few of the unhappy screen of death and had to reset the thing. Overall, I've had no trouble with the machine, so, I say, exchange it, move on, and whatnot.. - On the other hand, my 9 to 5 machine is a thinkpad T-60, which I've not had many issues with, however to two-workers with the same model have suffered the bad mobo issue.. - I think anything is going to have a lemon now and then, and sorry your first shot at Apple has send you the sour face. I don't think I could consider going back to a PC for my regular machine, although I do have XP/Paralells running for that one time a week I might need Windows.
  • dan
    Strange - i haven't ever seen anything like that with my laptop - and I run it pretty hard 12+ hours a day. I've found that sleep/battery swap doesn't work too well for me, but then again I also don't have it doing the safe-sleep swap to disk immediately thing.

    There is a firmware update out, and I found that after applying that I got the gray screen on startup but another cycle of holding the power button down for 5 seconds (or however many it took for the machine to beep at me and do the firmware load) took care of that.
  • Sounds kinda like it's dropping into deep sleep mode and having trouble getting out of it. My powerbook g4 does that. If the battery drops to nothing it drops into no-power hibernation mode. Once I plug it back in it, takes anywhere from 5-15 minutes to turn back on. I haven't researched much about why this is since I just try to not let the battery die.
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