Q: Lion randomly crashes - black screen

I can confirm that Photo Booth 2nd Effects page locks my system.

2010 MacBook Pro 2.66 i7, 8 GB RAM.

I could never get a consistent lock ups except for two things. The 2nd page of the Photo Booth effects and downloading files to my Desktop in Chrome (yeah, strange).

So just to understand what people are finding now... it's a failing or bad logic board with GPU that has always been problematic, but is only now showing up with Lion? I need to know so I can make sure to get this **** fixed before the warranty or Applecare runs out.

@al_varus

Can you try the following?

Yep, all works perfectly fine for me now without a problem.

I've owned a few Macs now (17" Powerbook, 13" Macbook, 13" Macbook Pro, 27" iMac) in addition to this 15" MBP - none of those have been as problematic as this one. Considering that the Nvidia discrete GPUs had overheating issues when first introduced in '08/'09, and the '11 MBPs now use ATI chips, it makes me suspect that the Nvidia GPUs have always had problems in MBP.

If I didn't already have the extended warranty on my 15" MBP, I'd seriously consider getting it.

There is a new cuda development driver up at the nvidia site (ver 4.0.31).  I installed it on my previously unusable mid-2010 mb pro i7 2.66Ghz about three hours ago and have been running in dynamic switching mode with no crashes so far.  Not saying that this is a fix, but before installing 4.0.31 my mb pro crashed very reliably when running keynote, PPT, photobooth (second effects tab test) etc. 

I have been exercising the switching actively for the last hour and so far everything is working.

Link to the nvidia site - install at your own risk: http://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-toolkit-40

Thank you for good news, i005754!

Will try it.

@i005754, I have done as your writed, but I got the crashes- black screen panic as soon as I changed the energy saving mode to auto.

I called the Apple Tech today morning( I am in China), but they answered me just to take a test without more information to let the MBP work stable.

Look forward for the helpful solution or practices to make the MBP alive.

The same as James

Had found the same CUDA updated driver (4.0.31), and been running it for several days in Snow Leopard without a crash, and now testing in Lion. A couple of hours of activity with dynamic switching has so far failed to cause the crash, so we may have another possible solution here. That said, my laptop is now sitting on an Apple repairer's desk with a clean install of Lion (minus the updated driver), so we'll see what they have to say about the situation...

For those whom the driver updated didn't help, did you try a reboot immediately after the update?

Guess I spoke too soon... just confirmed a crash on another MPB with the new updated driver

Did install the CUDA as well. But since deleting system files I did not have any crash. Some of you did report, that it doesn't help. Are there same people as well it helped?

Regarding this one:

UPDATE: Navigate to ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/, delete any files that contain "windowserver," and reboot the machine. The procedure may need to be repeated if you regularly connect to an external monitor once it is also connected.

Same Problem here,

random crashes or black screens after clean Lion install.

Mostly on the Login Screen...

MacBook Pro 6,2

2,66 GHz Core i7

4 GB RAM

Lion Build (11A511)

Apple, please fix this, I need a stable MBP for work!

same problem here, black screen or frozen screen, on a iMac Late 2009, i7 + AMD Graphic card + 16 gb of ram.

I never had that kind of problem with Snow Leopard. Am I the only one to have this problem with an iMac Late 2009.

I can reproduce the problem with any video intensive application, last time I had the problem was while playing StarCraft II, after 5 min playing, the system is unresponsive and it plays a very annoying sound.

Anything I might try to fix this problem ?

Thanks

J.

The CUDA updated driver seems to be working for me so far. I've got my external monitor back up and working, which wasn't working before that. Haven't done anything to push it to crash yet, but if I can do my normal work with an external for now, thats better than what was happening before.

Like many of you I had the same problems. However they started when I was still running on Snow Leopard. After doing a complete clean install of Lion I was hoping my worrying days were over, but "au contraire" ... things only got worse.

So I installed the CUDA updated drivers that @i005754 mentioned in his post and so far things seem to be running smooth again. The problem mostly occured when running Powerpoint, iPhoto and/or iTunes but these last few hours I've started/stopped/restarted all these (and more) without any problem. What's more, the whole system feels like it's must faster and responsive now, but that's probably just wishfull thinking ...

Fingers crossed ...

My experience is below.  Obviously, YMMV, but this is what I experienced.

MB Pro - 15", Mid 2010

2.66 I7

8 GB Ram

Lion 10.7 (11A511)

- Under SL - No crashes.

- Under Lion - Multiple crashes an hour - anywhere from 1 - 4.  However, I never had the black screen; my system would completely freeze up and become unresponsive.  The only option was to turn off the machine by holding the power button.  Sometimes upon re-boot I would get a kernel panic; most of the times not.

After reading this thread, I downloaded gfxCardStatus, and set it to Integrated.  I immediately discovered that would not work since I have an external monitor.  On a whim (and the reported experience from one other poster in this thread), I forced it to Discrete only.

I have been running that way (Discrete Only) since noontime of Aug 4 with zero crashes - in other words, nearly four days without an issue. I am running the same software that I was when crashes were happening.  Additionally, I have tried a few of the scenarios others have listed that cause crashes; my machine simply no longer crashes.

For me, it appears that my issue is related directly to the dynamic switching (a dodgy concept to start out with, IMHO).  My system has been rock solid since eliminating the dynamic switching.

As with others, I believe that we are seeing multiple issues that are causing the same types of problems.  For those that have the problem under both SL and Lion, I do suspect that you have an underlying hardware problem.  However, even when the hardware problem is resolved, I do think you will have a driver problem (especially with the dynamic switching).

I noted at least one other person in this thread that has stayed on Discrete Only graphics and was running with no issues.  Is there anyone else that is running discrete only?  What are your results?  If this is truly a switching problem and not a nVidia discrete graphics driver problem, then there will be a LOT of happy people that need to run external monitors and/or heavy duty graphics.

Again, this is my experience.  YMMV.

I have similar behaviour as Jonereno, I am able to work in integrated only mode using gfxCardStatus and I am able to use my external monitor with descrete only but when I disconnect my external monitor and disable gfxCardStatus I get black screens/kernal panics ... seems for me the switching is the main problem.