[NeXTLoop]

I'm running the latest model 2.4GHz 15" MBP. It seems that every 3-5 days its completely freezes up. Already this month, its happened about 5 times. 4 of them have been when waking the display (not the actual machine) from sleep, or from screensaver. The other time was when during normal use. The only way to recover is to hold down the Power Button. Apple Hardware Test and Disk Utility show everything as ok.

I can still move the mouse, but nothing responds. I've read elsewhere that there seems to be some issues with the NVidia drivers that come with this machine, and that can cause some of the problems related to the display waking up.

Another possibility is that it's caused by 'lookupd' and can consitently br reproduced by running tcpflow or tcpdump. I can't confirm this, as I haven't tried yet.

I looked at the Crash Reporter Logs, and noticed that I had a WindowServer Crash Log. Found this in it...


Exception: EXC_BAD_ACCESS (0x0001)
Codes: KERN_INVALID_ADDRESS (0x0001) at 0xff3c68a9


Anyone else experiencing this?

P.S. The memory is stock from Apple at time of purchase, 2GB total. I upgraded the HD to a Samsung 250GB 5400RPM driver.

[seanc]

Sounds like bad RAM to me.

I upgraded the HD to a Samsung 250GB 5400RPM driver.

You did it yourself? or did you have an AASP do it? If you did it yourself, your warranty is gone.

[NeXTLoop]

Yeah, I did it myself. But that only voids the warranty as it applies to the HD, if I'm not mistaken. If the Logic Board was fried, for example, that would still be covered.

[seanc]

I thought that on the MBP or PowerBooks, it voided the entire thing because of the lengths you have to disassemble the machine, it's not like the MacBooks which are easily removable.

[NeXTLoop]

I had always heard it was a case of "if you break it... its your problem." So if you screw up the HD, or if you somehow break the Logic Board (spill coffee in it while doing it, etc) then you're left out in the cold.

But as long as there's no signs of damage, its not like Apple is going to refuse to work on it just because you opened it up and replaced the HD. They just won't touch the HD itself.

Besides, I did a WAY better of job than anyone who's ever done it from me from CompUSA. Every machine I've ever had upgraded at CompUSA has always come back with odd spaces in the casing, etc. In the case of my upgrade, I took my time and now you wouldn't ever be able to tell the case was ever opened.

[seanc]

Fair enough. Back to the topic, try removing a stick of RAM to see how things go.

[NeXTLoop]

Well, I think I have the solution to this freezing. After exhaustively going over my crash logs, specifically the WindowServer Crash Logs, it appears the problem relates to a conflict with the driver for the NVIDIA GPU and having an external monitor plugged in.

The crash log seemed to indicate that there was a problem with Core Graphics successfully "releasing" the external monitor, leading to an eventual crash of the WindowServer. Of the last 5 crashes I've had, 4 have been with an external monitor plugged in, and the 5th was a day or so after unplugging the monitor (after it had been plugged in for a couple of days).

After the last crash, I've ran the machine without ever plugging the external monitor back in. At this point I have 7+ days of uptime, which is the longest I've ever ran with this machine without a crash since getting it. If it lasts a couple of more days, I'd say that's the problem.

Further evidence is that on the Apple Discussion Boards, people seem to be having quite a bit of problems with external monitors and this generation of MBPs. Not conclusive... but definitely supporing evidence.

If the NVIDIA driver is the problem, hopefully Leopard will include updated/better ones...

[seanc]

Did they not release any driver updates a few days ago?

[NeXTLoop]

They released an EFI Firmware update. But as my MBP is the latest generation, the update said that I had the most current version and refused to apply. Plus, the update didn't have anything to do with GPU drivers anyway.