It all started about three months ago. Before that time, I rarely used my MBP's dedicated graphics chip. Then, because I began playing WoW again, and because of job demands for more powerful graphics, I started using the 9600 almost exclusively. It was fine for a week or so... and then the problems began.
My MBP would occasionally freeze for no apparent reason; the dock would first become unresponsive, then the screen would start flickering, then the mouse cursor would become ultra-sensitive, before, finally, the whole system is completely frozen. I have left the laptop on in this condition for more than 10 hours, just to see if it would unfreeze itself. It didn't.
At first, it would happen only once every few days. But as time went on, the freezes became more and more frequent. The day before I finally took it to an Apple Authorized Service Provider, it had frozen on me twice while I was writing an e-mail.
The freezes can happen any time, on pretty much any app. It has happened while I was working in Illustrator, playing WoW, browsing in Safari, browsing in Chrome, writing an e-mail in Mail, running a screensaver, opening Steam, idling on the desktop, or even after rebooting the MBP.
The creepiest part of the freezes, however, were the console error messages. Most of the time, there were *none*. Not a single line at the time of the freeze. I can pinpoint the time of the freeze to the second, because the moment the MBP freezes, the clock on the menu bar freezes as well. Once in a while, however, I'd get lines containing something like "APIC error on cpu(0)" and/or "NVDA channel exception". Not being a computer engineer, I have no idea what they mean, except that I'm guessing something's wrong with the CPU, mainboard, or GPU.
But then I took the damn thing to an AASP, and what do they tell me? "It's a software issue, you're going to have to reinstall the OS, and you can't restore it from a Time Machine backup". They expect me to backup my files. Manually. Then reinstall every single application myself.
Please, can somebody tell me whether I'm being toyed around by lazy/incompetent/irresponsible techs, or is it really just a software problem?
My MBP would occasionally freeze for no apparent reason; the dock would first become unresponsive, then the screen would start flickering, then the mouse cursor would become ultra-sensitive, before, finally, the whole system is completely frozen. I have left the laptop on in this condition for more than 10 hours, just to see if it would unfreeze itself. It didn't.
At first, it would happen only once every few days. But as time went on, the freezes became more and more frequent. The day before I finally took it to an Apple Authorized Service Provider, it had frozen on me twice while I was writing an e-mail.
The freezes can happen any time, on pretty much any app. It has happened while I was working in Illustrator, playing WoW, browsing in Safari, browsing in Chrome, writing an e-mail in Mail, running a screensaver, opening Steam, idling on the desktop, or even after rebooting the MBP.
The creepiest part of the freezes, however, were the console error messages. Most of the time, there were *none*. Not a single line at the time of the freeze. I can pinpoint the time of the freeze to the second, because the moment the MBP freezes, the clock on the menu bar freezes as well. Once in a while, however, I'd get lines containing something like "APIC error on cpu(0)" and/or "NVDA channel exception". Not being a computer engineer, I have no idea what they mean, except that I'm guessing something's wrong with the CPU, mainboard, or GPU.
But then I took the damn thing to an AASP, and what do they tell me? "It's a software issue, you're going to have to reinstall the OS, and you can't restore it from a Time Machine backup". They expect me to backup my files. Manually. Then reinstall every single application myself.
Please, can somebody tell me whether I'm being toyed around by lazy/incompetent/irresponsible techs, or is it really just a software problem?
