Much as I love my new Macbook (I write this as a diehard Linux user), there’s something that’s soured my burgeoning new relationship with the thing over the last few weeks.
Google for “Macbook Random Shutdown” and you’ll see what I mean. There’s a fairly large section of the Macbook owner population that are having some odd problems…
Essentially, when the machine is cold, regardless of whether it’s on battery or mains, and also regardless of whether it’s booting from cold, or waking from sleep mode, it will run for a few minutes, and then, guaranteed, every time, it will just turn itself off. Completely off. All-lights-off off. All-work-lost off. Possible-data-corruption off. Once it’s warmed up after a restart or two, however, it will run all day without a problem. This started happening once the machine was about two months old.
Initially I thought it was a RAM issue (I upgraded from 512Mb to 2Gb with 3rd-party RAM) so I re-inserted the original RAM. No difference.
I also tried other Apple suggestions: resetting PRAM, doing a PMU reset, reseating the hard disk, and so on. Nothing makes a difference.
Apple has made no official pronouncement on this issue at the moment. I’ve seen a rumour somewhere that someone reported that an Apple employee told them that Apple is aware of this and will be issuing a fix in the next few weeks. If this is true, this would seem to imply that it’s NOT a hardware issue, which has been my assumption to date. I’m loath to get the machine repaired, as I’ve seen plenty of posts saying that the problem comes back soon after, say, getting the logic board replaced by Apple.
So: I’m currently trying to decide: limp on for the next few weeks in the hope of some possible fix, or take it in for a lengthy “repair” which probably won’t fix the problem. Decisions, decisions…
Well I took the plunge and rang Applecare. They seemed very professional, and gave the impression that they knew how to fix it. The next day a courier turned up with a box for me to put the machine in. Hopefully (fingers crossed) I’ll get it back towards the end of this week… watch this space…
…and what seems like an eternity later, I finally got it back today. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the problem is solved. Apple HAVE now officially admitted the problem, so hopefully that means they DEFINITELY know now to solve it. Here’s hoping I can now get back to being an Apple convert. The old Dell seemed really heavy and slow over the last few weeks.