Q: Lion randomly crashes - black screen

Since there seem to be no software remedies you can take, perhaps the next step would be to have your hardware evaluated. Please post when you find out what's going on...

Here's a tip for those that gfxCardStatus works on integrated mode: Don't shut down your computer for as long as possible. always sleep it, because when it wakes up, it wakes up with the intel card, while when booting, it boots with nvidia first and often BSOD's..

i did a complete hardware test this morning with the DVD that came with my MBP and it didn't found any problems.

I also had freezes or cascading freezes when just browsing on the Internet...that was over a month ago. It was related to the 3G mini-cell AT&T tower that was a couple of feet from my computer--when I moved the min-cell to another room, the freezes stopped. There are quite a few things that can cause this interference...Apple has a great article, which covers this problem:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1365

Cordless phones, especially the 2.4 Ghz frequency can cause this problem as well as satellite dishes, etc. I never had these issues in Snow Leopard, but from what I understand, the communications protocols have really been tightened in Lion because of security concerns.

Another suggestion would be to check for older third party software, particularly if it is Adobe software. Their Air program, which I never consciously installed (it snuck on during a PS install) writes thousands of errors to the console app every minute, and is no longer supported by Adobe--it is incompatible with Lion. It usually installs itself in your utilities folder and is removed with the Adobe uninstaller.

As for the sleep issue, try to keep it simple for now by turning off automatic sleep and see if that helps

• In energy saver preferences turn the sleep option slide to never
• In energy saver preferences uncheck the "automatically reduce brightness before the display goes to sleep option"
• turn off all screen savers

When you want your computer to sleep, choose the option from the upper left apple logo, close the lid, or press the on / off button  lightly. There have been intermittent issues with sleep since Leopard, and the above measures seem to help this issue. This is not ideal, but perhaps this will create a more stable computer environment until Apple comes up with a fix.

In the end, if nothing helps, IMHO it's time to let Apple take a look at your computer.

I have a 2010 MBP i7 and am seeing the problem since installing Lion late last week.

This morning the problem occurred during the login screen after a fresh reboot (no running sessions, no previous logins).

MacBook Pro 15 inch/ 2.4 Ghz Mid 2010/ April /

I bring my machine only with a freh LION install on a hard drive reformatted to the Apple store in France and make the demo with the "Photo Booth effect to the Génius

Boom !

Direct to the BSOD

The genius has make some usal simple test and reset with his tools, and find anything wrong.

He decide to keek my MBP for 48H to make some tests ...

He call me later and tell me that the US engineers are aware off the problem but they can't do anything at the moment

I Took back my 2000 € machine, the genius made a new fesh instal and tell me he could not reproduice the BSOD but he know the problem

He say , as soon as Apple will be able to find the origin they will decide to make , recall or firmware update  ... Ghummmmm

As soon i was at home, Boom !! BSOD with Safari just surfing

Nothing else as LION on my machine, pure Apple !!!

:-(

The genius send me a email with the new KBase article about BSOD

" Hello,

Thierry thought you might find this article useful. We hope it helps resolve your technical issue.

MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2010): Intermittent black screen or loss of video

Click on the link above or copy and paste the following address into your Web browser to view the article: <http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4086?viewlocale=en_US>

Best regards,
The Apple Support Team

This message has been auto-generated. Please do not reply to this email.It was sent from an address that cannot accept incoming mail."

17" MacBook Pro (Mid-2009) GeForce 9400M 256MB 4GB 1067MHz DDR3

OS X 10.7.2 (Build 11C74)

Add me to the list of the BSOD. This has happened to me about 5 times now within the past week, and twice already today! On every occasion, it happened immediately after i would open the screen to "wake" the computer. I don't think it actually went into sleep mode either time that this incident occurred, because i know after it happened the first time, i was a little cautios and trying to take mental notes as to whether the computer actually goes to sleep or not. I know the sleep indicator light that is supposed to pulsate, stayed a solid white light. The fans would continue to run at full speed. After waiting long enough to know that it wasn't going to sleep, i opened the lid and the screen would instantly come on, only to go out a second or two later. Keyboard illumination continued to work, CAPS LOCK, and NUM Lock lights continued to light up, but the brightness/contrast buttons on the keyboard would not work to bring the screen back.

Well today when this happened, the first time, i force restarted the computer immediately (as i have done with all previous incidents), but the second time today i actually forced myself to wait a few minutes to see if the screen would in fact come back on its own, and it did! So knowing this now, i almost want to kind of think that maybe there is some kind of software/firmware update they can release to correct this issue, as i have only found this to happen with Lion, and am unable to reproduce it on my Snow Leopard partition. I have sent a few bug reports in every time this has happened and i am just waiting (hoping) for some kind of response or recognition that there is in fact an issue that effects more than just the 2010 models they are only taking credit for thus far.

Yday's desperate 5th clean installation of Lion made my 13'' MBPro Feb '11 to run smoothly and faster than ever. Eventhough, black screen returned the exact second that my iPhone 4 starts installing the new iOS 5. I will keep reporting for any further problems, but for now the only moment that computer is blackscreened, is upon downloading the iOS 5 & beggins to setup. 

I have the same problem on my Macbook pro 15-inch, 2,4 GHz Intel Core i5, mid 2010.  The BSOD occurs when i press on hyperlinks in either google chrome or safari. Hate it to have to manually reboot this expensive machine... Hope that it isn't hardware related cuz my warranty expired last month and i think that for the high price we pay for these nice machines apple should fix it for free.

Just another case of the same problem here. Mid 2010 15-inch, i5 2,4 GHz, GeForce GT 330M. BSOD started immediately after upgrading to Lion. The PhotoBooth trick never fails. gfxCardStatus in the integrated mode works perfectly. Today for the first time BSOD occured on boot (before gfx had a chance to start).

I am very unhappy with the fact that Apple is bringing out a major software version without properly testing it and then needs months to acknowledge it. This is my first Mac. What a disappointment!

MacBook 15" i5 mid 2010. Three months ago i updated to Lion. Since then and on random crushes, especially when i opened mac appstore. I would say everytime i opened mac appstore. Now crushes are even more often and sometimes i can't even procceed to the login screen before one happens.

Three months now.

And everytime black screen happens a part of me breaks inside.

Here's another one. Mid 2010 2.66 15-inch i7 . Random BSOD started when i installed Lion. It almost always occurs when I download files in Chrome and very frequently in VLC too.

Again...and again...tired of freezed screen. Macbook pro mid 2010 and lion, bad combination. Please we are waiting for a solution. We want to use our laptops in a no crash mode!

Same problem here - intermittent BSOD for the past several weeks.  MBP 2010, 8GB RAM.

It was same here - crash and BSoD every 15-20 minutes or so. Doing anything - Safari, VLC, Mail, once or twice on its own, while system was freshly after login and nothing was even launched! I have mid '10 MacBook Pro, 2.53 i5, and upgraded to 8GB of RAM. It was happening just after upgrading to Lion (so about 3 months ago), but I got it to stop somehow (don't remember how atm) and after upgrading to 10.7.2 it started again! I tried almost everything - installing again on what was already on HDD, installing after formatting the drive and then recovering from Time Machine, installing Windows 7 on Boot Camp, but it gave me BSoD during install every single time (tried about 8 times...), installing Windows 7 after formatting HDD (so fresh install without Boot Camp), I even installed Ubuntu and it keeped not working and not booting at all after restarting...

So I finally erased whole HDD. And when I say whole I mean it - I booted it from Snow Leopard's DVD, so I could erase it all - including Lion's Recovery Partition and then formated it with option to write it with 0s (not quick format), then fresh install of Lion 10.7.2 (from my Lion's Recovery USB drive) and now it works so far so good, with no BSoD's. I didn't recover anything from my Time Machine, as it broke my Lion last time (I've done the same format).

I will work on this fresh OS while waiting for Apple to resolve the issue, as I need to work somehow, not to be irritated the whole time after n-th restart...

Hope it will help some of you, as you can try doing it my way.

And yes, I don't have gfxCardStatus now and Photo Booth works fine without any BSoD.

I will write again if it crashes