Mid 2010 MacBook Pro randomly restarting

Hello,

I wanted to drop Apple an email regarding this issue, but they seem careless about customers living in countries with Apple resellers only and don't think they might need to get expert help via email. Better buy a PC next time. I hope I will at least find some help here. I also think my problem might apply to this: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4088

Here is the letter:

Dear Sir/Madam,

I have a Mid 2010 15-inch MacBook Pro, on which I have been running Snow Leopard, Lion and Mountain Lion with no problems. But recently I have been working with my computer when suddenly screen turned black and the computer restarted. (Actually, when it restarted for first time it shut down before the startup sound, but booted up without problems after I turned it on via the power button.) Since it was the first time I didn't pay attention.

Then after a few days it happened again, but this time the computer didn't seem like booting up again. When I finally got to the grey screen I tried safe booting with verbose mode, which sadly ended with the same restart after “DSMOS has arrived” line. From this I assume the problem won't lie in non-stock kernel extensions. I also tried resetting NVRAM with no success.

I had a flash drive with stock Mountain Lion installer, succesfuly booted it up and let it run for a while, after about 15 minutes it shut down with the same black screen. From this I assume that the problem dosen't lie in my current Mountain Lion installation.

From report logs I can tell two kernel extensions common to all the restarts: com.apple.NVDAResman, com.apple.nvidia.nv50hal; and four appearing only in some cases: com.apple.driver.AGPM, com.apple.GeForce, com.apple.iokit.IONDRVSupport, com.apple.iokit.IOGraphicsFamily.

This made me suspicious about the dedicated Nvidia graphic card. I installed an utility called gfxCardStatus, which not only shows which card is currently in use, but also allows for force using of specific card. I also installed NovaBench to have some GPU-heavy benchmark available. When I run NovaBench, the computer switched from integrated to dedicated card with no problems, and the benchmark succesfuly finished. But when I tried forcing switch to any of the cards the computer restarted with the black screen. This made me suspicious about the logic board instead of specific graphics card.

The problems also occurs when waking up form sleep. Sometimes it would wake up normally, but sometimes it would immidiately restart to a grey screen saying “Your computer restarted because of a problem. Wait a few seconds or press a key to continue starting up.”

To summarize the problem, the computer restarts randomly and fails to wake up from sleep sometimes. I got it as a gift from my father, who lives in Slovakia and have bought it from local reseller. The problem is that I live in Czech Republic and I have some doubts regarding the quality of support at resellers. (Namely I am afraid they will say “See, it runs. There's no problem.”) Also I need to constantly work on a project for school competition, which is mostly done in Photoshop, and longer time without my computer would severely threaten the deadline. I would be very grateful to first have an opinion from Apple empolyee, who really has an in-depth knowledge of MacBooks and Mac OS X.

Update: After writing this I tried resetting SMC, again with no success.

Thanks in advance.

Yours faithfully

Samuel Novák