MacBook Shutdown Temporary Fix
If you’ve been having problems with sudden shutdowns on your MacBook or MacBook Pro, I have some advice that might be of help to you.
First of all: If you’re having problems starting up at all, try holding down the power button for about 15 seconds, and the machine will emit a beep and afterwards boot up with the cpus locked at 1 GHz. In my experience the machine can still suffer from sudden shutdowns in this mode, if it is stressed sufficiently, though.
The one thing I found to cure the issue completely is to disable one of the two cpu cores. This might sound scary, but it’s really quite harmless and easy to do. You should grab the CHUD tools from Apple’s tool download site and install them. In system preferences you will find a new item called “Processor”. Remove the tick at CPU2 and you’re now running with just one core enabled.
This is of course not a long term solution, but since it appears that Apple are suffering from supply problems (probably because of the back to school season), it can take some time before enough logic boards are sent to repair centers. I’d rather have a 2 GHz single core laptop than a 2 GHz dual core one that crashes if I look at it wrong.
This will probably only solve some of the sudden shutdowns (particularly those where the machines tend to crash under heavy load), but let’s get as many possible solutions out there as possible.
Other things to try include resetting the PMU (unplug the power supply, remove the battery and hold down the power button for five seconds before putting things back together) and zapping the PRAM (hold down cmd-option-p-r after power on till you hear a second chime).
If you should get some weird vertical lines along the reboots don’t panic. This is a software issue and is also solved by zapping the PRAM followed by changing the screen mode to 1024*768 (stretched), rebooting and choosing your normal screen mode again.
I hope this helps some of you out there.
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