Randomly Turns Off

Quite interesting :

My macbook has the shutoff problem. My father has a macbook which works perfectly. so i tried swapping the RAM and the Hard drive. the transplant went fine and i'm currently using my father's macbook with my ram and hard drive in it. It's stable, no surprise. And mine is crashing exactly the same way. Again, no surprise.

What surprise me is the following : i have the Hardware Monitor Widget installed.

http://www.bresink.com/osx/HardwareMonitorWE.html

On my faulty macbook, only ONE sensor was found by this widget : the hard disk (SMART disk fujitsu blablabla).

Currently on my father's macbook, there are THREE sensors found. The hard disk, and CPU Core 1 and CPU Core 2 !

It seems there's a sensor problem in here. But i guess a sensor doesn't make a machine crash ...

What is this widget showing on your faulty macbook ?

bontempi

What is this widget showing on your faulty macbook ?

Only the SMART Disk sensor on mine.

What versions of the widget are you running? 1.7 works without speedit installed but 1.6 needs the speedit kext loaded. Without the kext on 1.6 you will only see the smart hd status.

using 1.7 here.
may be a bug, is there any other way to check which sensors are available ? any small app ?

Few more data points:

I'm having what seems like a very classic case of /this/... week 20 machine... worked fine (mooing aside) until about 10 days ago, and started random shutdowns - couple per day on average, impossible to predict.

FOR ANYONE NEEDING TO DEMONSTRATE SHUTTING OFF TO APPLE STAFF: Someone posted above that they could trigger it by getting the core temp to read 172 degrees F (per CoreDuoTemp, etc.)... I tried and this is also exactly true for me. Be interesting to see if when people run dev/null or YouTube or other business to make it happen, if it's always happening at this same temp...

It does ALSO shut off sometimes when recently awake from sleep and with low processor usage (i.e. wake up, start typing an email, then shutoff). Doubt the core temp could be 172 at these times, but I'm not positive.

Also, I tried the Hardware Monitor widget being discussed just now (v1.7), and I too show only the hard drive sensor...

Hope this doesn't get too expensive for Apple, stock-wise...

macbook 2.0/2G Mac OS X (10.4.7)

Mine was doing the same thing, just got off the phone with Apple and they want me to send it in for repairs.

On another note, I have 2gb 3rd party RAM in it and they told me to leave it in. Should I do that or do I have to worry about some tech pocketing it and sticking 512mb in my machine (as it came from the factory)?

I would leave it in if they asked you to. I highly doubt a tech would pocket your RAM. 🙂

In fact, I sent my previous computer in (iBook G4) with 1GB extra RAM, and it wasn't a problem.

My BlackBook has shut down spontaneously three times today (in as many hours). Yet I just did both overload tricks simultaneously for more than 20 minutes with no shutdown or even a sign of working hard. I looped 4 HD movie clips downloaded from the QuickTime site, keeping them all visible on my screen, while in the background I ran the "yes" command in THREE Terminal windows at once. Eventually, the fan kicked in. Eventually, it stopped. In the Activity Monitor, QuickTime occasionally occupied greater than 110% of the CPU (I'm assuming that 200% is the maximum for the dual core chip), though usually it stayed around 70%. Terminal tended to hover around 40% of CPU. But aside from the background videos being completely stuttery and unwatchable, the computer didn't seem unhappy at all. The temperature moved from the mid 60˚s C to about 72˚C.

BUT HERE'S AN INTERESTING FACT: MY 2.0 GHz PROCESSOR NEVER BUDGED FROM 1.0GHz CLOCK SPEED! In fact, as far as I can tell, it hasn't budged from there since yesterday!

I now have Hardware Monitor installed, so I can track it more accurately.

macbook, ibook, powerbook g4 Mac OS X (10.4.7)

That's exactly when it most predictably happens to me. That's why temperature overload by itself doesn't make sense. It shuts down before it has time to get hot.

mikacooper: Did you turn your macbook on by holding the power button until the sleep light blinks fast? I noticed if I booted that way, my cpu's were pegged @ 1GHz


The only way I could reliably reproduce the shutdown (80% of the time) is to make sure it has been powered off for two or more hours so it's completely cooled off, turn it on and begin to use it for light tasks (ie Safari, iCal, etc). It would almost always shutdown when the temp was rising between 35-40C. If I warmed up the cpus too fast with 'yes' or HD videos it would run for hours without a shutdown. I made sure I explained this to apple support that if they test the macbook with a diagnostic program that would stress the hardware, it's probably won't exhibit a problem. I mentioned just browsing in safari would cause a shutdown from a cold boot in less than five minutes.

I even set Safari's home page to this post on the off chance they try this to make it crash 🙂



White Macbook Mac OS X (10.4.7) 2.0GHz | 2GB RAM | 100GB 7200RPM HD

Same issue here.

I called AppleCare and asked the tech if he was aware of this issue. Instead of listening to me, he went right into his script..pull the battery...da da da...

Asked again, are you aware of this issue? Seems like a huge problem is you look at your own web site....he said nope, and I get 40 calls per day in a very smug tone..... dead air.

So, I hung up and called back. Got a good guy on this time.

He said he never heard of it, but went to the site and siad, YIKES!!!! Hold on one second....

He came back on and said he spoke to engineering team and they had just officialy recognized this as an issue. He said it was a processor and board issue and I would need to send it back.

So, good news it, sounds like they know they have a core engineering issue and how to fix it. I will probably take some time to trickle out to the field, so if you call, ask them to check the site (14K views) and then see if they can call engineering to make sure the problem is properly diagnosed.

If you don't, they might just do a power reset, test it, and send it back...repeat cycle....

john

BlackBook Mac OS X (10.4.7)

JG_PC-Mac

That's GREAT! Thumbs up to Apple.

Now I'm just worried about making sure the person who works on my computer when I send it in (a box was just dispatched) has found out about this... :-/

FYI, Just reporting another instance of this problem.
I have an iBook G4. I updated to 10.4.7 last week. Today was the first time my iBook suddenly shut off as others have reported.

iBook G4 Mac OS X (10.4.7)

Thought I would add my two cents. I am actually on my third macbook, and a long LONG-time mac user. I have never (not since 1984) ever had any hardware issues with a mac, so I was startled to have issues only hours after I had set up the macbook.

The first Macbook I bought was in the second week of June (week 19). It got scortching hot and immediately started to shut down at random. I couldn't find any patterns for why it was shutting down and took it in to the genius bar (Burlington, MA). They found nothing wrong with the computer and reset my PRAM and sent me back home. It kept shutting down and finally, I took it in with the computer screen frozen. You could see the ghost of the black-screen-o-death and the computer was burning hot. The genius bar swapped out my hard drive into a brand new computer.

I took computer two home (same details, but a week 26). It too began to randomly shut down after only the first night.

I took it back into an apple store and explained the situation and said that I didn't want to bother trying to troubleshoot since it seemed to be exactly the same issue as before. The apple people could not have been more helpful (Chestnut Hill, MA). They said they understood, were sorry, and IMMEDIATELY swapped out my hard drive into a new (week 28) computer which I am typing on now. And after an hour on, the computer is still relatively cool to the touch and no shut downs... so far.

I was stunned (and pleased) that the apple staff did not make me go through the entire rigormoral of trying to proove that the computer was randomly shutting down. However the speed with which they gave me a new computer makes me think that they had heard this issue many times before... I explained that I had been on this forum and noticed that several people seemed to be having the same issue. The apple staff member I spoke with said that she was not allowed to post on the forums herself since she worked for apple, but she seemed aware of the situation. Again, she was very helpful.

Just food for thought. Very pleased with the apple service and hoping that this is the last change.

Add me to the list.

You guys who live in areas with Apple Stores or even mail-in service are lucky. Here in Vancouver (pop 2.2 million) we get the little indie shops that will take ages to get the needed parts and open when they feel like it.

So I wasted an entire afternoon with Esther of Apple Tech Support, who suggested such gems as:
- Do you have any third party software installed on your computer? (I was asked this 3 times during the call)
- Try to repair disk permissions.
- Run the apple hardware test until you are able to replicate the problem.

Ad nauseum. I can't afford even MORE downtime (my MacBook, ordered on introduction day, was delivered 2 weeks late, thanks to FedEx losing the package and nobody bothering to let me know) -- so I have to live with the machine for now. $20,000 personally spent over 10 years with Apple, and countless purchasing decisions influenced -- and this is what I get.

Boy it feels good to whine.