Macbook Random Shutdown

My BlackBook is scheduled to have its logic board replaced at the Apple Store (Yorkdale) in Toronto. in the meantime it has chewed up and spat out our precious (OSX) Address Book, leaving NO contacts intact. My only hope is that my iBook has not synced and also lost its contents.
Any similar experiences with Intel macs I think should be discussed, in case it is related to the bad logic board. We never had any problems with our iBook in FIVE years of heavy-duty use. Did I mention five years? reliable service?
ME

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White 2.0 Ghz Macbook bought in mid-August. I’m seeing:

- underside gets very hot, running or off, some times more than others
- when I close the lid, the sleep light stays solid instead of pulses and you can still hear that something is powered on (happens about 1/2 the time)
- when I shut it down, you can still hear that something is powered (about 1/2 the time) unless you hold down the power key again for it to stop; also sometimes the front LED stays on solid even after shut down with the lid closed
- occasionally shuts off without warning (3 or 4 times since I got it 2 wks ago)
- occasionally reboots by itself after being shut down
- sometimes difficult to wake up after it’s been put in one of the above-described sleep sates, needs rebooting, coaxing, etc.

I have been using various applications when the random shutdowns have occurred–Remote Desktop Connection, Firefox, Finder. The yes > /dev/null & yes > /dev/null command does, indeed, kick the fans into overdrive and cause considerable heat. I’m not sure whether that’s a difinitive test for anything, but it’s troublesome to know that Macs now come with a built-in “melt” command.

Reminds me of the PowerMac 6500′s when they first switched from SCSI to ATA drives. Lots of flashing question marks for weeks, with no word from Apple, then finally a fix came.

At the moment my strategy is to wait a bit longer until they have the source of the problem nailed down before taking it to an Apple store for repair. I’d rather do that than have them guess about what component(s) to replace–so far I’ve heard lots of different things–logic board, power supply, heat sink, etc.

Several others where I work (Yale) are encountering this with their Macbooks as well.

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A huge fan of Apple, and not heeding the “Revision A” warnings (I never have heeded them in the past and have been fine), I bought my two kids a MacBook in May, and got myself one a month later.  Well, in August, my daughters (white, 1.83) starts randomly shutting down.  Then my son’s (black).  Then mine (black).  Not just occasionally.  Often.  With increasing frequency.  Whether on battery or not.  Whether running OS X or Windows (one machine has XP installed via Bootcamp).  With factory memory.
Our Apple Specialist didn’t seem terribly surprised to hear about the problem, but seeing three dropped off at once was a bit of a shock to him.  Jokingly said, “Thanks for being hardware testers.”  I laughed … a little.

Here’s hoping.

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My week 20 White MacBook 2.0GHz, 1GB/RAM, 80GB/HD bought from Apple Store (US) started experiencing the random shutdown on 08/10, after 70 days of use. Since then I must press the power button up to cause the processor to be capped at 1GHz while Apple doesn’t assume officially the problem and its solution. It is very very annoying!!! Help, I want my MB working fine again!

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Hi, does any one remember the logic board problems with the white G3 iBooks. It’s seemingly a bit sloppy that Apple have run into yet more logic board or firmware trouble. What’s happening with the MacBooks seems to me very similar to the iBooks. Mine had FOUR logic boards in a period (from new) of around eighteen months!!!

I don’t know what’s going on here, but I’m sure most manufacturers of laptops happily go about their business with rarely a problem with what is, lets face it, a static bit of hardware with NO moving parts.

I was watching the diggnation podcast the other day and Kevin Rose’s MacBook was up and down like a whores drawers – constantly re-booting. He though it looked like a logic board problem!

I am writing this on my MacBook Pro 17″ and very much hope it suffers none of these problems.

Philber

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Crossposted from my blog @ the8thsign.com

My Macbook has RSS, and I’m not talking about Really Simple Syndication. My 3 month old Macbook has recently started randomly rebooting itself. Random Shutdown Syndrome. It started 2 weeks ago, July 6th to exactly, out of no where. Outside of the discolored palm rests, the machine has been flawless.

For me it all started while I was installing Tiger on an external Firewire drive. Happened about 5-6 times that day, most of them in a row. I couldn’t get the system to boot until i reset the PMU. Since then I was installing Vista pre-RC1 using Boot Camp and it rebooted on me during the install there too. I can be surfing the web, reading rss, listen to music, or nothing at all. All of a sudden, BOOM! black screen. Hit the power button then BOOM! black screen again. This goes on for 3 or 4 tries before it will boot up usually. Right now I’m getting about 5 shutdowns a week but last night alone i had 3; 2 while inside Windows Vista.

It happens for while using Vista, OS X on 2 different internal drives, OS X on an external firewire so its not the operation system or software. I’ve used two different hard drives and two different set of memory chips. Does not matter. I did not have the problem prior to 10.4.7 but the update has nothing to do with it. The SMC firmware update, while helping my Macbook to run cooler, did not help or make it worst.

Here are come steps you can take to eliminate all troubleshooting:

1. If you have upgraded your RAM and/or Hard Drive, change them back to the stock components.
2. Back up your data and do a fresh install of Mac OS X from your install DVD.
3. Do a PMU reset. This involves removing the battery, disconnecting the AC adaptor then holding the Power button down for 5secs. replace the battey and connect the power supply back then restart the machine
4. Try resting the PRAM. Option-Command-P-R during startup until you here the chime 3 times.
5. With the battery and/or AC adaptor connected, hold down the Power Button for until you here a loud chime. This seems to help me when I cant get the system to boot.
6. After all this, startup a Terminal window and run the command “yes > /dev/null” then start another Terminal and run the same command. Let this run for about 15mins. Your Macbooks fans should kick in during this time. This will strain the CPUs and a lot of times you will get a shutdown during or shortly after this.
7. If your still having random reboots after all this, contact Applecare for a repair.

I’ve done all this and have yet to contact Applecare. My Macbook is my only computer and I reply on it for work and personal. I’ve been trying to find a older G4 machine, iBook or Mac Mini to hold me over while this would be away getting repaired but apparently Mac’s hold their value very well. I can’ seen to find anything reasonable to hold me over. So right now I’m kinda stuck and not sure what my next step is. According to the forums over at Apple, replacing the logic board doesn’t work and the problem will resurface. I had mine for 3 months before it started so who knows if people who aren’t having issues after a board replacement will see problems down the road.

I am not alone in this issue either.

Here are some links to others having the same problem:

• The Apple Blog
• The Apple Files
• www.macbookrandomshutdown.com
• Apple.com Fourms
• O’Grady

These are just a few. If anyone else is having this problem, drop me a comment and let me know how you made out or if anyone has a good deal on a Mac I could use as a replacement while this is back at Applecare, let me know.

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I’ve been using my macbook since june and it has never had a problem (well it has problems with the stains but apple replaced all the affected parts and it now looks new). Since I installed the SMC firmware update.
I’ve been suffering the random shutdown syndrome during the last 2 weeks (it has shutted down around 20 times)…so I defitively think it is all because of the firmware update.
I know when the macbook it’s going to have a RS: the CPU load it’s strangely high (like 23% all the time) and the fans are really quiet. Suddenly they start up and the computer shuts down…quite strange behavior.
In Spain we don’t have Apple Retail Stores so we have to make massive calls in order to get something from apple. The call uses to be free but sometimes they tell you to call to the technical service and that call it’s like 40â?¬ per minute…so it’s pretty hard to make the spanish division notice this problems.
My macbook serial # is: 4H6215E6U9E
It has the SMC 1.4f10
I’m starting to feel a little bit angry with apple’s new policy…

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Hello!

I have a week 19 white MB, 2.0 GHz, 1 GB RAM, 60 GB Drive.  I purchased mine from an Apple store on May 20, 2006 it started experiencing the RSS about August 10, 2006.  The first time I experienced it was during the use of Apple’s Backup utility to a network drive shared from a Linux box via Samba.  I was concerned that this was causing the problem.  I believe the 10.4.7 update came around this time as well.  I thought it might be fixed when I saw that some AFP deadlocks were addressed in the udpate.  Then it happened while in I was using Entourage and so I started logging it in a notebook so I could post it if others started having these issues. Here’s some personal experience of RSS: Note, all time between these logs there were no issues and this MB is plugged in and runs all day/night in my office which is at about 75 degrees F all the time.

 8/14/06: (9AM) Using entourage, crash, let sit for few minutes power up, found -82 in /var/log/system.log as shutdown cause.

 8/15/06: (9AM) Using entourage, some online banking, left, came back MB was off, let sit for a few minutes, restarted 9:08 AM.   (10 PM) On battery working 1.5 hours (outside office), went to publish iWeb to .Mac and crash, let sit, fire back up, re-publish all was good.

 8/19/06: Using iWeb, published to .Mac, crash, had 3 back-to-back crashes this time.

 8/23/06: SMC firmware installed for fan behavior.  After this update I could actually hear the fan running now, I’ve never heard my fan up to this point.  My CPU cores ran much cooler after this update (about 20 degrees F cooler) also my HD ran about 20 degrees F cooler. 

 8/27/06: (7 AM) Came into office this morning and found system off.

 8/27/06:  (6:20 PM) Came into office again and found system off.

 I’ve been without issues since 8/27/06 and it’s 8/31/06 now.

 I was so sure the firmware helped but when it (RSS) came back 4 days later I was bummed.  I’m a long time PC user and this is my first Mac (Well, second if you count my Apple IIe).  I’m hesitant to recommend the portables to anyone at this point until Apple determines the cause.  I am eye-balling a Mac Pro (Quad Processor) though to get some serious video work done, that thing looks like it completely rocks!

I’ll keep you all posted on my experiences with the RSS.  Hopefully the firmware helped some others out there…

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Well, here I am.. in good company it seems. The cursed random black screen of nothing.

The Apple center in Adelaide has alway been good to me with my 15″ powerbook, and they have been pretty thorough systematically pulling my Macbook to bits: reseated memory, every HW test known to man, internal and external disks, batteries, PROM’s firmware…….. to no avail. My case is now “escalated” to Apple. The tech folk are watching the forums, the blogs and the “partner / service” bulletins from Apple. They now have more that one Macbook displaying the same symptoms here in Adelaide – and given the inconclusive trials and tribulations from around the globe, they’re not sure that simply ordering new logic boards etc… is going to solve anything.

One thought could be that Apple are going to have to rev their logic boards and PMU’s (which unlike the MacBook Pro, are integrated).

Now, I work for an IT hardware vendor, and I’ve seen complicated HW problems before, and they’re not always easy to solve…
but after 2 weeks without my beloved Macbook, I’ve got my fingers crossed that Apple are close to a fix on this one! (and I’m guessing I’m not alone!)

- jd
Adelaide, Australia.

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