Q: Lion randomly crashes - black screen
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Jul 27, 2011 10:03 PMby dbld_sa,Also this is not symptomatic to Lion alone, issue existed well in Snow leopard, as many attested here, my self included. And it appears to be most pronounced on mid 2010 MBP line.
Even within that group there are unaffected users. So this leans towards questions around hardware batch quality used in MBP mid 2010 line ?!
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Jul 27, 2011 11:46 PMby martin_apple,I'm in the same boat - mid 2010 MBP i7, experiencing kernel panics with SL occasionaly, reproducible in specific circumstances (i.e. Powerpoint in slideshow mode)
After upgrading to Lion, unable to work with the MBP due to kernel panics (NVDAResman) every few minutes.
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Jul 28, 2011 4:17 AMby Digitus,This is clearly a hardware problem; I will be surprised if it was a driver issue. I too was experiencing this occasionally with SL, but lived with it. Shouldn't have.
But now with the frequent crashes with Lion I'm hosed. I need to drive an external monitor, and therefore need to have the nVidia card working properly. Problem is that I'm two months out of my warranty period. What is Apple going to do about it? Will they offer a free swap or repair in order to maintain goodwill with their loyal and trusting customers?
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Jul 28, 2011 5:00 AMby geoffreyalanholliday,One thing I've noticed since day-one of Mac OS X, going back ten years now is that any time the ''international screen of death'' appears and freezes up and forces a restart, 99.9-percent of the time it is network related.
This flies in the face of the whole NVIDIA theory. It also doesn't seem to apply because there appears not to be an ''international screen of death'' in Lion.
I have also been experiencing this random freeze/crash/reboot issue, and because I have the ''automatically reboot'' on freeze option checked in preferences, I am not there for every crash, but it is indeed happing often because I hear the tell-tale ''bong.''
Whatever issue it is, most likely it will be fixed in the point-one update. This random freeze/reboot syndrome and the sudden loss of battery life seem to be the most significant issues faced by MacBook/Pro owners--and indeed may be related to a graphics hand-off issue between the integrated and discrete chipsets.
I also use gfxCardStatus. Most ''nice'' applications will release any discrete/NVIDIA dependency when not needed, or when quit. Firefox 6 is a different breed of problem as it will ''spin off'' dependencies and ''hijack'' the NVIDIA chip for Flash and QuickTime--but then not release it when you leave a page with those elements. This is a Firefox fail and an annoying one. A Flash solution is available called FlashFrozen. You can set it for ''auto-kill'' and anytime a Flash element is encountered, it will do exactly that. Unfortunately, it's not smart enough to wait, and you will forget you've got it enabled and wonder why Flash keeps crashing--but you will at least get better battery life by not using Flash. QuickTime has no such solution of which I'm aware. Thus, you can't keep your web browser open once you've encountered a QT element--at least if it's Firefox. Also, if you plan to use the new Google-plus Hangouts, you will be required to install two plugins that will hijack the NVIDIA chip as well.
Again, this is tangential to the random crash issue. Hoping, like everyone else here, for an update soon.
One thing I can say is nice in the face of this crashing issue--the ability to have all my work/windows brought back from the dead without loss of work. Maybe they developed this feature just to battle the random crashes?
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Jul 28, 2011 5:04 AMby johnny_83,Article about it:
http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-20083947-263/some-lion-users-plagued-by-bla ck-screen-bug/
Cit: "Apple has claimed to be looking into it, and has asked people for crash reports and other details of the problem."
So say we all
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Jul 28, 2011 7:32 AMby Endareth,Just to make things worse, since restoring back to Snow Leopard on my MBP, I've been getting hit with this crash every day or so (had previously only happened 2-3 times since purchase). I'm wondering if the Lion update made a firmware change which has caused this. It would explain my problems even back in Snow Leopard. Would be interested to know if anyone else has returned to Snow Leopard and experienced the same as me.
Oh, and I too am now a few weeks out of warranty, will not be impressed if this becomes a hardware issue that Apple try to charge me for. Might go harangue the local Apple store again tomorrow…
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Jul 28, 2011 8:16 AMby Endareth,Looks like 9to5Mac have picked up on this too, though they're referencing another thread here, apparently relating to iMacs rather than MBPs (and mainly on waking from sleep). Anyone want to bet on the odds of those iMacs using the same nVidia chipset? Personally, I'd trade a failure to recover from sleep for these random crashes...
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Jul 28, 2011 11:21 AMby Anastasis,Same issues here with a 2010 MacBook Pro i7 with 4GB of RAM. Have done a reinstall to no avail. The only difference is that instead of the black screen I am actually getting the kernel panic screen with the multiple languages on it. Today is the first time we got a black screen. Wife called and said she could hear the fans on the computer running at full speed the moment she walked in the door. Screen was black and took several minutes to 'wake' to the kernel panic screen.
Apple, please address this ASAP. This is our only computer and it is currently unusable for any extended amount of time.
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Jul 28, 2011 1:04 PMby i005754,gfxCardStatus seems to have reduced the number of crashes, but not eliminated them entirely. Running with the dynamic or discrete setting my i7 mid-2010 mbpro will crash within minutes of use. Running with the integrated setting reduces my crashes to about 1 an hour.
I am not sure if it is my imagination, but generally speaking the machine is crashing more and more frequently?
Snow Leopard was rock-solid on my hardware with the uptimes measured in weeks.
