2011 MBP freezing on external display in fullscreen

I also have Office 11 (on MBP "13) and it keeps crashing when i plug in my ex monitor, e.g. pinwheel on screen (mouse still moves) but blank on ex monitor.

one thing i found that seems to work is open system preferences > displays. having this open when i plugged it in, detected my dell monitor and popped right up on the ex monitor for me to adjust display/brightness/etc.

not sure if this is the end all solution, but seemed to work for me.

Has anyone found a resolution to this issue? I have a 2010 MBP 2.66 C2D, 8GB, 256SSD NVIDIA GeForce 320M 256MB,

I have had this problem in OS X 10.6, 10.7 and now 10.8. What happens is even if i am working the monitor seems to go to sleepmode and it locks up the MBP the only way to get it back is to powerdown the MBP, this is a huge issue when i am coding a website and in the middle it just basically crashes.

This happened when i had the original HDD the upgraded 500GB momentus XT and with the 256SSD i have now.

You, but not others on this thread, may be having a problem with...

Mid-2010 15" MacBook Pros - the bad NVIDIA GPU

If you're having frequent kernel panics with your 15" mid-2010, or intermittent screen problems, the problem is, more than likely, the faulty NVIDIA GPU found in a number of those machines.

Here's just a sample of a kernel panic log that points to the faulty NVIDIA card:

Kernel Extensions in backtrace (with dependencies):          com.apple.GeForce(6.4.0)@0x82ac4000->0x82b7afff             dependency: com.apple.NVDAResman(6.4.0)@0x834a0000             dependency: com.apple.iokit.IONDRVSupport(2.2.1)@0x82fd3000             dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOPCIFamily(2.6.5)@0x7a802000             dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOGraphicsFamily(2.2.1)@0x8301b000          com.apple.nvidia.nv50hal(6.4.0)@0x83c05000->0x84019fff             dependency: com.apple.NVDAResman(6.4.0)@0x834a0000          com.apple.NVDAResman(6.4.0)@0x834a0000->0x8378dfff             dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOPCIFamily(2.6.5)@0x7a802000             dependency: com.apple.iokit.IONDRVSupport(2.2.1)@0x82fd3000             dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOGraphicsFamily(2.2.1)@0x8301b000

Here's the "official" Apple take on the issue - but the very real kernel panics need not be preceded by 'Intermittent black screen or loss of video'... in fact, you might not experience any video problems at all. Although video problems can certainly be a portent of things to come…

So what can you do? Print out a copy of your kernel panic and a copy of the Knowledge Base article and take them, along with your machine, to your local Apple Store or an Apple Authorized Service Provider. They should be more than willing to install a new logic board at no cost. I have no idea why this faulty GPU is making the headline here on the MacBook Pro forum so often now - could it be because Mountain Lion is just bringing the issue to a head more readily? I don't know - I only know that we're seeing more and more of these kernel panics of late.

Good luck,

Clinton

Well... I am pretty sure there was an issue with the video card. Mine had it too... they had to change twice the motherboard of the MBP 2010, 1st Gen Core i7, 4 GB DDR3. I digged into the problem on mine and had to do with a batch of bad video cards.

I spent an extra $500 on top of my year old MBP 2010. Since the repair, it has never froze on me again.

My two cents

Hi Benjalamelami,

I have the same problem with my MBP mid-2010. The mother-board has been changed once for free, but freezing display issue still happens regurlaly.

Why did you have to spend $500 ? The mid-2010 MBP with this kind of issue is fixed up for free by Apple ...

In my case, I suspect the Apple Store which looked after my computer installed a bad card.

Hi blk182n7,

This isn't a technical solution by any means, but I purchased a matrox ds1: http://www.matrox.com/docking_station/en/ds1/.

This has allowed me to connect to an external monitor with 100% success rate. Expensive solution but works perfect and makes for a clean look on my desk.

Hi all,

My MBP recently started freezing when connected to an external monitor. My MBP is a late 2012 model and I never had the issue until I upgraded to Mavericks a few weeks ago...

Has anyone else experienced this on a Mavericks machine?

Hmm seems resonable. I have not had my MBP connected to a display for sometime now because of this problem. I did notice on my 24in Samsung Display i never had an issue only with the Apple Cinema displays. I am pretty sure they are not Thunderbolt displays, but maybe there is a driver issue? I have not tried in OS X 10.9.1 as of yet. BUt it is a clean install.

I started having the same problem immediately after upgrading to Mavericks.

MBP 17inch late 2011.

The system seems to only crash when sleeping while connected to apple cinema display. Never had this problem before upgrading to Mavericks.

My Macbook Pro 15" is also freezing and the screen is full of verticle or horizontal lines, often reboots automatically and I get the grey screen with text. It is a nightmare and seems to be a major problem with MacBook Pros of this year. I have the top of the line with 2.5 GHz i7, 16GB RAM, intel and separate AMD Radeon HD 6770M card. This is a real bummer and I want to know if Apple is doing the right thing and correcting this problem for people at no charge?? I've owned over 10 macbook pros and never had this type of problem. The machine is too new to be breaking down like this. If anyone knows of a solution or how to get Apple to respond to the community with a solution, please chime in! Thanks.