Q: MacBook Pro Blank Screen (Built - in & External) - continued

Problem: Screen black but computer on (chime, number lock and keyboard lights working, hard drive accessible).

The Mac reseller said that this kind of problem was covered by Apple even if the computer was no longer under guarantee. For more info:

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2377

Hope this helps.

Finally found an apple place and they said pretty much the same thing. Except here in Africa I'll need to wait 2 weeks instead of just a few days :P

Though you may hear it too many times in this thread, I'm having EXACTLY the same issue most people have here. Just one different: my Geforce 8600M card of my MBP bought Jan 2008 is still struggling with probably the last breath. Every time the black screen thing happened, I did all operations I could such as resetting PRAM, SMC, etc. And after hours of messing around, the display became ok again.

But the frequency of the black screen issue is increasing from once per month to 2 or 3 times per week. And now, almost everyday I boot my MBP, there will be a dead screen.

Inspired by some posts in this thread, I enabled screen sharing and connected to it from my ubuntu box. And it turned out to be the whole system was just working fine except the graphics card. I could browse all parts in System Profiler except the "graphics/Display" tab. As long as I click it, the system profiler will crash. What's more, when I tried to run World of Warcraft, there was a error message saying 3D acceleration failed. So, finally I confirmed myself it should be the Geforce 8600M's problem which caused the black screen.

Now I'm in the fear of the total death of the graphics card since I've been busy these days and can't afford to send my MBP weeks to be repaired.

Btw, as someone guessed above, I also used an external monitor sometime. Don't know if external monitor would accelerate the breaking down process of the graphics card.

My MBP was nearly the highest setup at that time. The price was nearly 3 times expensive of a normal PC notebook. I believe we spent so much money on this pro model because we want to buy QUALITY. We are NOT hired by the big companies to test their hardware.

In regards to external monitors, I am on my third logic board / graphics card combo (I've sent the machine in twice for repair) with my MBP purchased in June 2007.

I have never used an external monitor with this machine.

Btw, as someone guessed above, I also used an external monitor sometime. Don't know if external
monitor would accelerate the breaking down process of the graphics card.

I purchased my MBP in October 2007. From all accounts, it appears that I have the same issue with my blank display. However, being there are no Apple Stores here I took it to the only AARS in town. They did a diagnostic and said it does not qualify for Apple's repair/recall for the 8600M. It's out of warranty, so I'm screwed.

Any advice?

My story began at 9am yesterday and ended at 4pm, after speaking with at least 3 different Apple Technicians. The latter of which I reasoned with and explained that if the issue is NOT the video card, then why does everything ELSE work just fine? He agreed, called the AASP, had them connect an external monitor and when he came back he told me that Apple will be covering this case.

Hooray! Persistence appears to be key to this issue. I have to say however, that the Apple Technicians are by far the nicest and easiest to understand group of support folks I've ever dealt with.

Hopefully I will have my MBP back soon. I miss him.

Another one joining the list!
I came back from work today (This week I've been using my Mbp for working purposes) I tried booting up my mbp.....and black screen of death. I reset PRAM, reseated RAM.....and as you can guess nothing worked!

I've checked this forum and I'm really happy to see that my MBP has one of those "amazing" GT 8600. I'd book an appointment for the Apple Store, but I've already check and they have no available space until sunday, that is the day I' travelling away for a week... so I guess I'm going to have to wait for a week before taking my laptop in.

My only concern is that my laptop has a considerable dent where the CD drive is.... I just hope they don't use this as an excuse for not fixing the laptop

Here is how I got my display working again.

Same problem, black screen(s), everything else working.
Just deleting sleepimage and extension.mkext file and resetting NVRAM and SMC didn't help.
In *very rare* cases, when T-booting, the display worked. But turned back to black just after next reboot.

To me, the whole hassle more and more doesn't look like a hardware problem even if a lot of people here got their logic board exchanged.

I am not sure, but I have the impression that also killing all tasks related to "parallels" helped.
How many people of you have parallels installed?
I managed to enable SSH remote login by using VoiceOver (fncommandF5), and loggend in remotely.
- "sudo kill -9" all running tasks related to parallels
- remove /private/var/vm/sleepimage and /System/Library/Extensions.mkext
- "pmset -g" shows hibernatemode 3
After reboot, the display worked again
- login, open shell "pmset -a hibernatemode 0"
- remove /private/var/vm/sleepimage again
Since then, screen(s) are working again. Puh.
Canceled repair appointment with Apple dealer. My old machine already was prepared to help out for the next 2 weeks...

Hi guys, like most people here, I wouldn't usually write on these kind of forums, but I'm extremely angry about my MBP not working. It's only two months old. I bought it in February and three weeks ago after falling asleep listening to music, it wouldn't turn back on. I brought it to Mactivate who said it had signs of liquid damage (which I don't see how as I'm the only user of the laptop and I'm very very careful with it). Anyway, I work from home so I needed it back on ASAP. They changed the logic board free of charge and replaced the MagSafe Adaptor for 115 euro. I didn't care as I was without my laptop for two weeks and desperately needed it back. I checked my warranty status there and it says I'm covered until Feb 2010, so it must just be a one year warranty. So I brought it home last week, delighted to get things going again and to get work back on track. First thing I done was download some new software updates from Apple. 30 mins after getting it back, same problem again. Black screen, light appears on front of laptop, you can hear fans or some form of activity, disc spins etc etc. I tried everything but to no avail. So now it looks like I have to leave it back in again. Which is going to further set me back with work and I'll lose out on more money. It's really put me in bad humour as the laptop didn't come cheap, as we all know.

It's a 2.4Ghz / 15" / 2gb RAM / 250gb HD / Nvidia GForce 9400M and Nvidia 9600M GT. I know a lot of problems stemmed with the 8600 but I found some documents online that said the 9600 is also faulty and that it will be covered under warranty. This is the last thing I expected from a Macbook Pro.

http://www.electronista.com/articles/08/12/26/nvidia.urging.new.material/
This article says that the 9600m chip which I have is known to be faulty. "Many current chips from NVIDIA, including the GeForce 9600M of the current MacBook Pro as well as virtually all GeForce 8M parts, use material with a lower melting point and so are prone to long-term failures that blank out video and have prompted warranty extensions by Apple, Dell and HP."

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/921/1049921/inquirer-confirms-apple-mac book-pros-have-nvidia-bad-bump-material
- More proof of this chip being faulty.

After it went for the second time, I tried everything but wouldn't work. It came back on the following day then but is back off now and no signs of improving.

I'm going out to buy a firewire cable now to attempt what the previous poster has done. I hope that it works, but no computer should give anyone this much hassle, especially a brand new one with such high spec.

OK, miraculously it has turned back on. I drained the battery, then removed it, left it out for a while and then recharged the battery completely and it came on. I'm afraid to turn it off now but I've set it not to sleep, ever. I also installed Fan Control. Few questions... what is the safest temperature to keep it at? What base speed is the best? What upper and lower threshold have you guys got set? I'm on a MBP 2.4Ghz, 2gb RAM, 15" screen. I have the base speed set to 2400rpm and lower threshold is 50(122f), higher is 80c (176f). It seems to have been staying around 50c (122f) at the minute, and that's with a DVD burning (trying to save some data) and Firefox open with around 10 tabs. Should I be keeping it at a lower temperature or is this right?

I use smcFanControl to monitor the temperature manually, crank up the fan if you must. I try and keep the MBP no warmer than 75c now, because I've been burnt by my MBP before... the cursed blank screen.

Default for me is 2000 rpm @ ~ 50c with basic browsing and youtube.
While gaming and under heavy tasks(War3), I now set to 4250 rpm and the temperature hovers around 70-75c.

On my MBP, prior to motherboard replacement, the blank screen does come back to life every so often. However, the symptoms did get progressively worse to eventually unusable (even with smcFanControl) I would definitely back up whatever you have, you never know when the screen will go dark.

I switched it off (reluctantly) last night when going to bed and this morning, same again, wouldn't switch on. I've a serious pain in my *** with this. I phoned the company who replaced the logic board again yesterday and told them I'd be reading up on it and it seems to be the graphics card, they said mine is the newer model, which I know, and it was the 8600 (not the 9400/9600m that I have) that Apple said was faulty. He said the chances of the same mistake happening again after the 8600 are unlikely, but it's the exact same symptoms and I've found plenty of documents online that say the 9400/9600m are faulty. You can find links in the posts above. So where do I go from here? It's only two months old and cost me an absolute fortune. This shouldn't happen, especially when I done nothing wrong. This is a manufacturing fault so why should I have to suffer for it.

Mine just started doing this yesterday. I've had my MBP 2.6Ghz with the 8600M for 2 years. I just finally decided to drop the money for 8GB of RAM and a 120GB SLC SSD about a month or so ago, so I thought I hurt something doing that. I installed OSX, did all the updates, disabled the safe sleep function, deleted the safe sleep 4GB file, and removed all of the PPC code from all my programs and all of the extra languages. I have a 4TB firewire 800 drive with a 500GB passport firewire800 daisychained to it. My laptop is basically always on, ever since I bought her she's been left on even when she wasn't doing anything.

My laptop monitor just suddenly went black, but the external works fine. The laptop monitor's backlight works fine, it's just displaying a black image. It's more like a sleep or screensaver type issue, because it doesn't affect the performance at all. If I just leave it alone and continue working, it comes back on in like 10-30min on its own.

I have not read all of these posts. I don't have time to sit here and read thousands of posts to see what's been covered. Have we determined that it's not a virus of any kind? Have we determined it's not some new update that is faulty? This is not a hardware problem.

I'm going to try a fresh format and clean reinstall. I might try putting 10.6 on here just to see as well. I need my computer, but it won't put me out too much to give this a try, then just restore it off the timecapsule if it has no useful effect. Has anyone tried a complete format and fresh install from scratch?

Thanks much! :-D
Alex

Something I just noticed that might have something to do with this. I was in the middle of editing pictures, actively using the Wacom tablet, and the laptop monitor dimmed from inactivity, but the 30" didn't. It corrected itself within 20 seconds.

??

My MBP had this problem so I went into one of my university's computer labs to use their firewire cord and iMac to backup my computer on to my iPod via target disk mode. Anyways, I start everything up and TDM is not working. I get someone to help me and he was able to get my screen working again by pushing on the keyboard. His reasoning: He had an HP computer where the gpu would start to "peel off of the motherboard" (his words) and by making a connection everything works fine again.