Q: Lion randomly crashes - black screen

i never had this problem on SL. it happened right after the installation of Lion. it is truely disappointing that i am out warranty and 2 hrs away from the nearest apple store. so if i had to pay to fix this problem, i will donwgrade to SL, and sell macbook pro for good.

@Don - I had my mid-2010 mb pro i7 logic board replaced last week and have had no BSOD problems since. 

The only complaint I have now is the extreme heat radiating from my machine.  iStat routinely shows temperatures in excess of 80F inside my machine and the fans are running >3000rpm almost constantly now. 

Lion???  I am beginning to think they should have called it Bill the Cat      hehehe...

i have now applied gfxCardStatus and Fan Control and deleted windowserver related files. Hope it works, for now.

@vlan2k8 Yep I couldn't agree more. It reeks of the iphone 4 debacle where they ALSO refused to admit to an issue till the very end. They should be giving some nod to the issue but its not gunna happen. Apple seems to have a policy of acknowledging anything which could lead to negative publicity.

Also, AFAIK there was only a single person on this forum who had the MB replaced and continued to experience the issue. They had it replaced a 2nd time and finally are crash free?

@DonYuppie, I'm sure the problem existed it just wasn't "uncovered" by the drivers of SL.

I read a few people on here have had MB's replaced even outside of apple care for free.

Also just remember the issue with rolling back to SL: the first thing a buyer will do is upgrade to Lion. They'll kernel panic and demand their money back.

gfxCardStatus is a dodgy stop-gap. No external monitor, slow video, no games etc

@i005754 if its really hot maybe worth taking back *again* to have them check the heat. Possibly they did a dodgy heat sink or heat transfer paste install etc? or possibly one of the fans isn't running at all?

Update...I haven't had any BSOD for a while, but the computer is acting strangely when doing graphical jobs...importing small folders into Aperture causes the Temp to go to 99 degrees...centigrade. It never did that before. Also the MBP started going crazy on a webpage with fans blazing and temps soaring. It took 2 reboots to stop this behavior. I called Apple and they want to check out the computer. I've done all that I can, and now it's time for the techs. We have a rather small local store, so it's going in to the repair center in CA I think...will update again when I find out what's going on...darn.

I went to the 'not so' genius bar in Chatswood, AU last Wednesday and they are truely hopeless. I even printed out a few pages from this thread and he wouldn't look at them with the comment "Don't believe everything you read on forums".

After some to-and-fro'ing (argueing really) he said they can replace the logic board but it's a 3-5 day turn around. I'm going back to see if they can order it and then take a day becuase it's unacceptable for me to be without my laptop as it's for work.

I want to take the lid off and/or ues the system information to find out if there is some hardware ID that I can take note of and see if it's different after they replace it. Maybe there was a different chip or something on the new logic boards and the user who said it took them two goes got the same version refitted on the first go.

The thing that really ******* me the woman next to me had an iPhone 4 and the not so genius identified it with water penetration and said to her "be more careful but I'll replace it for free"....

What's hilarious is how less than a week ago, someone a few pages back took an identical machine to that very same chatswood store which was replaced completely with a fresh 2011 macbook pro?! This is what boggles my mind... there's no consistancy whatsoever with apple on this issue.

FYI i decided to take mine to Nextbyte on Clarence street, Sydney as a registered repairer rather than apple's sydney store. I figured i might get a more personal service. What i've appreciated with Nextbyte is the technician working on the machine called me personally to explain his progress and what he's found.

@ wast3gat3

My Mac Pro runs 2 or 3 weeks with Lion without any issues (heavy aperture and CS5 usage). With SnowLeopard i never had any problems within a year. When a few days ago i got my first BSOD i tried to analyze my hardware, everything looked good. I also made no changes to the system (updates, new apps etc).

There was just one big change: temperature!

We had a very bad summer with an average temperature of maybe 20 degree, but since Monday we have between 33 and 39 degrees. When i start up my mac, log in and work with aperture or CS5 i have just a few minutes and the screen goes black. When i just log in and do nothing, i have 10 to 20 minutes to the BSOD. Maybe because the machine is idle and the hardware temperature goes slowly up...

Sounds crazy...

Chris

I'm having the same issues as the rest of you guys, installing 10.7.1 hasn't helped either. Black screens and reboots all the way

Almost 1000 posts now in this thread.

Will Apple react before media pick this up?

Do you also have problems with bootcamp btw?

Windows 7 seems to be really slow ... especially when playing games.

As if it would not use the dedicated nvidia chip.

I myself have had my Boot Camp (Windows 7) freeze twice with a black screen since my upgrade to Lion. This was while I was playing Battlefield Bad Company 2 and it consistently froze after an hour of play. Before Lion this never happened.

I am not sure if Lion messes around with firmware but it sure seems like it, if now my Boot Camp has the same kind of freezes.

And I'm not sure it has anything to do with the machine acting like it's overheating while in Lion, since many of my black screen freezes come from browsing some web sites.

For example, when I try to log in to my Comcast account to pay my bill, it gives me a black screen in both Chrome and Firefox. I finally had to use my girlfriend's Mac with Snow Leapord.

There is definitely something graphics related triggering the freeze. Surprised some hacker hasn't discovered the exact exploit and posted it on a web site.

Does anyone know if 10.7.1 helps at all? Should I update? someone in another thread was saying that after the update, he gets a black screen all the time since the start up.The mac doesn't even boot.

Still having issues after the .1 update. Obviously, it wasnt mentioned in the notes, so no harm there.

iPhoto is the culprit for me, both in the black screen and in the database repair.

i7 MBP 15" 2010