Lion on 2010 MBP blacking out, overheating and crashing on wake

I have the exact same problem. After upgrading to Lion my 2010 15inch MacBook pro with SSD crashed so many times I actually did a clean install of Lion just to see if it would fix it with no luck. Laptop would constantly crash to black screen but keyboard would still be lit up etc. Then after 20seconds or so would startup and send an error report to apple.

I also noticed that the fans were not running very fast and the MacBook pro was very hot. I installed fancontrol and saw that on idle the heat was 126 Fahrenheit Which seemed way too high. Usually when watching videos the fans would spin up but since installing lion the fans never seem to "spin up" very fast to deal with heat.

I thought maybe spotlight indexing rebuild may be putting extra load and causing crashes but the index is fully rebuilt and done and it still crashes to black like you described many many times. Prior to lion these crashes would never happen, a few minutes and hours after Clean install of lion I had had over a dozen crash to black screen crashes. Think it is a heat issue but not sure. Again since lion insall the fans do not seem to spinup adequately to deal with heat.

I hope this is resolved as I cannot do anything on my laptop at all without crashing. Not just videos but surfing web, listen music, writing papers, even on idle it seems to crash

Have problem still, I have found a larger thread that describes my problem over here

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3191083?start=0&tstart=0

seems like it is a graphics card / overheating issue?

Same exact issue on my macbook pro 2010 icore 7, 15" with SSD drive. Crashed to the black screen 3 times so far; I was dragging pictures to iPhoto. It did crash also while I was working on pixelmator. I also noticed a shorter battery life it seems.

Hope they fix this issue fast or I'll go back to snow leopard.

Same here. It happens when I turn on my computer. If I wait 10 Secs the black screen appears.

MacBook Pro late 2010, 2.8GHz i7, SSD.

I think the problem maybe googlechrome.

We have a number of macs and the one that is a problem was running google chrome.

We removed the googlechrome folder and the components from library/launchagents and library/launchdaemons and for the last few hours everything seems good.

Also when looking at activity monitor we found that we had some blackberry components that were responsible for a chunk of process activity. We haven't had a blackerry for years.

Same for me: I've already got black screen two times.

Unfortunately those two crashes happened in two different environments (during a long work session, and immediately after a sleep awake, so the MacBook Pro was totally cold), so I can't find out what is the reason of the crash.

MacBook Pro 2010 - i7 - 4GB - 15 inches

I have the same problem with my mbp13. After upgrading to Lion the fan didn't seem to kick in that made the mbp getting very hot. These days have been very warm and the fan kicking noise was very noticeable while i was still in snow leopard. In Lion it suddendly got quiet.

I'm experiencing the same issue on my mid 2010 Macbook Pro 15". I've tried resetting the power management (ctrl + shift + power), but unfortunately this did not work.

I'm actually seeing slightly different behavior in that I'm able to put my MBP to sleep and succesfully wake-up, but if the computer has been a sleep for an extended period of time, say around one hour, then it is unable to wake-up and presents me with a black screen and a spinning beach ball.

I am seeing very similar behavior on the same model of MacBook Pro. As some have said, it seems to be a problem with the discrete graphics hardware. It didn't completely solve the black screens and kernel panics, but installing gfxCardStatus and setting it to "Integrated Only" reduced them significantly. This is not a good workaround since it means slower graphics performance, but I am will to put up with that if it means reducing the number of panics and black screens.

By the way, I was able to reliably put my MBP into a black screen state requiring restart by running iTunes (10.4 or 10.5 beta) and letting it play music for a couple of minutes.

I hope Apple releases 10.7.1 soon with a fix for this since other than this issue, I am loving Lion.

I had the same issue. Crashing to a blackscreen randomly. I downloaded gfxCardStatus and used it to swith over to "Discrete Only" mode and the crashing seems to have cleared up... well, it hasn't Blackscreened since yesterday morning and it was doing it about every half hour before that.

Let me know if this helps or not.

I'm having all these issues too. Macbook pro mid-2010 i7 8Gs RAM, 500G.

gfxCardStatus seems to alleviate the symptoms a bit though.

Has anyone tried downloading and installing the Nvidia 330M SNOW LEOPARD drivers from the Nvidia website???

The .dmg is available on their website. I'm wondering if it will fix the issue, since I was not getting those crashes on snow leopard.

The crashes appear not only to be in 10.7 (Lion), but were already introduced in the last update 10.6.8 for Snow Leopard. After installing 10.6.8 I had this black-screen phenomenon once or twice a day, both on my large MacPro and on my (2 months old) MacBook Pro. So I updated to Lion as soon as it was out, hoping to get rid of the bug. But the situation is as bad there: 1-3 crashes per day.

The crash appears to be completely unrelated to the programs I'm running. But I get the impression that it has to do with the internet connection (maybe the integration of IPv6?). The machin crashed, when I worked with Firefox or with iTunes, but it also crashed, when I only loaded a Kerberos ticket without any other internet program open. So far, it never crashed, when I was not connected to the Internat.

Does anyone know, whether Apple is at least looking into the issue?

Addendum: The machin crashed at the very moment, when I sent the prvious message on this thread )<:

According to this updated post on ars technica

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/08/buggy-nvidia-drivers-giving-2010-macbo ok-pro-owners-lion-upgrade-headaches.ars

an Apple Care support specialist has told someone that the problem can be solved by navigating to

~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/

deleting any files that contain "windowserver," and then rebooting the machine. The procedure may need to be repeated if you regularly connect to an external monitor once it is also connected.

I found four files containing that term, I deleted them, and then rebooted. I then used gfxCardStatus to change back to Dynamic Switching. So far, so good, but it hasn't very long since I did this. I just wanted to get the word out about this possible fix. I will report back after I have run for a while (or after the first black screen or kernel panic).

I am back to update the proposed solution to this problem that I posted yesterday.

I have uninstalled gfxCardStatus and left my MBP running overnight. It was going nicely when I got back to it this morning. I then put it to sleep, went to work, and woke it without any issues. While this isn't definitive proof, I am optimistic and that deleting those files solves the problem without having to using slower graphics until Apple comes out with a complete fix in a future update. As they say, your mileage may vary.