Laptop keeps crashing and restarting

Question

Laptop keeps crashing and restarting

Usually goes straight to black screen then loading bar but background is grey instead of blue. Load bar often is quicker than normal but then repeats straight after. Other times goes to a message that says press key to restart computer.

Problem usually occurs when using Brave browser (which i think might be the problem after an update) but can happen in other browsers too. Have created an alternate login account but it has crashed in that also.

Backed up from an old time machine (not from pre-brave) but it still happens.

Have ran an EtreCheck which i will attach as well as an Apple crash report log. I have a Brave crash report that i can upload if necessary too but am not sure if it has private info so have left it off.

Thanks in advance.

Macbook Pro Mid 2012

Hardware Overview:

Model Name: MacBook Pro

Model Identifier: MacBookPro9,2

Processor Name: Dual-Core Intel Core i7

Processor Speed: 2.9 GHz

Number of Processors: 1

Total Number of Cores: 2

L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB

L3 Cache: 4 MB

Hyper-Threading Technology: Enabled

Memory: 16 GB

Boot ROM Version: 429.0.0.0.0

SMC Version (system): 2.2f44

Serial Number (system): C02JD1KNDV31

Hardware UUID: 8E5CC433-21C6-5156-A8E5-0BE1E80A2189

Sudden Motion Sensor:

State: Enabled

EtreCheck Report

Apple Crash Log

MacBook Pro 13″

Posted on Feb 20, 2024 9:45 AM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

HWTech

Community+ 2026

Level 9

75,084 points

Feb 21, 2024 9:24 PM in response to mike1whittington2

Most likely a memory issue since several of the crash logs mention "malloc: Incorrect checksum ... freed object ...... probably modified after being freed". "malloc" is memory allocation and the value of that item did not match what was expected to be there.

I see you do have a memory upgrade. How long have you had this memory upgrade? And what make & model of memory was installed? Macs are very picky about the memory they use. Try running the Apple Diagnostics to see if any hardware issues are detected. Except for an extreme failure the diagnostic may not detected any issues, but it never hurts to check.

You can also try running Memtest86 for a longer & more thorough memory test. However, even Memtest86 may not report any errors even if the memory is bad. If the default Memtest86 settings do not show any problems, then try modifying Memtest86's CPU options to "Sequential" and "Round Robin" to see if that makes any difference.

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Answer 2

Feb 23, 2024 3:43 AM in response to HWTech

Hi,

Thanks for looking into this. I did change out the memory in Feb 2022. I can't really remember if it started crashing more around then or not. Its quite an old laptop so is occasionally prone to crashing sometimes anyway but has got much much worse in last 6 months or so to where it is practically useless now. Has crashed multiple times trying to reply to this now.

I switched the memory for this: Crucial RAM CT2KIT102464BF160B 16 GB Kit (2 x 8 GB) DDR3 1600 MHz CL11 Laptop Memory . Don't know if its relevant but I never noticed much improvement when i upgraded it. Have seen conflicting things online about whether my macbook can even support 16gb ram. Do you know if any are compatible?

I ran diagnostics and memtest, both came back with no errors. I was unable to run sequential or round robin tests. When i tried i got these messages:

**Warning** Your UEFI firmware has limited multiprocessor support.

List of CPUs available for testing: 0

Multi CPU modes are unavailable due to UEFI firmware limitation.

I suppose I could try to see if i can dig out my old memory and put that back in to see if it helps.

Thank you

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Laptop keeps crashing and restarting

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