17" MBP Unibody - very slow/locking up/Fans running constantly

[brvheart]

Hi Guys -

I need the thoughts and advice from your seasoned Mac people -

I have 2 MBP's - 1 15" aluminum, one last years model 17" Unibody (with Black around screen).

The 15 has run great since day one. The 17" was ok, but now is locking up and causing me to reboot, fans seem to run on high all the time, and it is very slow to react while using the OS, it gets worse until it locks up. I have upgrade to Snow Leopard thinking that that might fix it, but it has not.

When I got it, I restored from the back up of my 15" using carbon copy cloner. I only imported users and data such as pictures and music.

Do you guys think that this is a hardware issue or a or should I back all my stuff up and then blow everything away and reinstall from the ground up with a fresh SL install?

When I called apple they tried to sell me apple care and told me that it was out of the full warranty and if I send it I would to pay for what was not under warranty. SO I am hoping that someone has seen this and has a fix that I can do without having to take it in.

Any help or guidance is appreciated.

 

[p3ncil]

First off, check your warranty status.
https://selfsolve.apple.com/GetWarranty.do

and 17"? Did you change the harddrive or dropped it before? If you are using a third party drive, it may be due to incompatibility.

 

[MackinIt]

It could be a hardware issue. My fathers imac looked to be experiencing a massive slow down after upgrading to Snow Leopard and eventually the hdd failed. I would try a fresh install definitely, especially before taking it to the Apple store. Did you happen to purchase the computer on a credit card that doubles the manufacture warranty?

 

[brvheart]

First off, check your warranty status.
https://selfsolve.apple.com/GetWarranty.do

and 17"? Did you change the harddrive or dropped it before? If you are using a third party drive, it may be due to incompatibility.

I checked the warranty status - it says limited.

I did not drop or change the HD - I just backed up my 15" MBP and copied all the info from one box to the other is all.

It could be a hardware issue. My fathers imac looked to be experiencing a massive slow down after upgrading to Snow Leopard and eventually the hdd failed. I would try a fresh install definitely, especially before taking it to the Apple store. Did you happen to purchase the computer on a credit card that doubles the manufacture warranty?

I did not buy it with a credit card, I bought it from CDW - so I guess I am out of luck. I am going to backup all my info to an external drive and then take a full CCC of it and reinstall and hope for the best.

 

[clyde2801]

Take it to the genius bar anyway. They don't charge to diagnose your system. If it's a software issue, they can tell you how to fix it. If it's a hardware issue, you might as well know what it is. I hope this is a minor problem.

I suspect the last thing you want to hear right now is "You should have bought applecare.", so I won't mention that. Good luck.

 

[apolloa]

I would reinstall everything from scratch first. My 15" unibody has crashed a few times and I have to have the fans set to run faster because it runs hotter SINCE I installed Snow Leopard on it. Never had a problem with any of that before.
Running SMC fan control helps it out but it definitely runs hotter now. I borrowed the SL disk of a friend to try it out before buying it as I have 2 Macs in my house. I'm am now seriously thinking of doing a complete backup and restoring back to 10.5 Leopard, I am leaving my other Mac well alone, I haven't put SL on that yet and probably won't.

 

[brvheart]

I did a full format and reinstall of SL - I will see how it goes. Thanks for the replies - stay tuned