Last Saturday, I got myself a new Unibody MacBook Pro. However it crashes once a day… By crashing I mean either a full freeze (mouse pointer unresponsive, closing the lid unresponsive, ambient-light sensor unresponsive) or a kernel panic. I didn’t find how to reproduce this issue, but in the last 4 days it has crashed once every single day.
Things I already tried:
- Ran the Mac Diagnostics (Apple Hardware Test), both the standard and extended tests; it reports “everything OK”
- Ran the Mac-ified memtest86+ for more than 9 hours; it reports “everything OK”
- Erased the NVRAM and erased and reinstalled Leopard (and all software updates); the problem persists
Just for the record: The only software installed is Leopard, iStat Pro and Adium.
Needless to say, I’m not really happy with the Apple hardware. After trying the above steps myself, I called Apple Care with this issue. I must admit, the guy on the phone was very helpful and recognized that I tried pretty much everything I could to solve the problem. He gave me an incident number and told me to return the MacBook Pro to the store, since the laptop is only 4 days old…
Update 2008-11-20: Phoned the store today. They told me that they’ve seen this kind of problem before on other MacBooks which had their RAM upgraded. They were expecting a shipment of other RAM-modules tonight. So tomorrow I’ll bring it in and try that.
Update 2008-11-22: Brought the Mac back to the store; they replaced the 4GB of RAM by “better modules”:
| Old | New |
|---|---|
BANK 0/DIMM0: Size: 2 GB Type: DDR3 Speed: 1067 MHz Status: OK Manufacturer: 0x0383 Part Number: 0x202020202020202020202020202020202020 Serial Number: 0x00000000 |
BANK 0/DIMM0: Size: 2 GB Type: DDR3 Speed: 1067 MHz Status: OK Manufacturer: 0x80AD Part Number: 0x484D54313235533641465038432D47372020 Serial Number: 0x30090000 |
BANK 0/DIMM1: Size: 2 GB Type: DDR3 Speed: 1067 MHz Status: OK Manufacturer: 0x0383 Part Number: 0x202020202020202020202020202020202020 Serial Number: 0x00000000 |
BANK 0/DIMM1: Size: 2 GB Type: DDR3 Speed: 1067 MHz Status: OK Manufacturer: 0x80AD Part Number: 0x484D54313235533641465038432D47372020 Serial Number: 0x100B0000 |
For the moment, this seems to solve the problem.
Update 2008-11-25: Still no crash or panic; looks good!
