Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

motox2121

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 26, 2012
5
0
Hey guys,

I have a 2011 macbook pro with 8 gigs of ram and I'm running dual hard drives, my OS is on a 256gb SSD and storage on my stock 750gb hd. My computer has run everything amazingly for over a year, running almost 24/7. It still runs everything amazingly at great speed, but my only problem is it will lock up after approximately 15mins-1hour, where it will continue to do whatever it was currently doing, whether playing a song etc, but won't allow any new commands such as opening a program and such. Just get the "rolling rainbow wheel" icon. It will stay in this state until I either reboot, or it will eventually go to the grey screen that has the Folder with a question mark icon on it. As soon as I reboot it runs great for another 30 minutes or so. Occurs in both os x and bootcamp win 7 with exact same symptoms. Haven't reformatted yet since it seems like a hardware problem as it happens on both mac / win.

Anyone experience these symptoms before?

Any help would be GREATLY appreciated..

THANK YOU!

----------

Forgot to add I already blew out the dust in the rear vent / speaker holes, and removed both fans and cleaned them out.

I also installed a temp monitoring / fanspeed software and it read relatively high on the graphics card, however it could be bugged.

Do these macbooks have a history of requiring thermal paste reapplication?
 
I also ran memtest 4 passes - all Passed no errors.

I also ran my own stress test running several cpu-intensive programs along with memtest - the CPU averaged at 87*-96*C and the GPU @ 60*-70*C for about 30 minutes straight. Are these temps much higher than normal? The fans were running @ max @ 6200 rpm the entire time.

This extreme stress didn't cause it to lock up any sooner than normal it still took the usual 30-45 mins to freeze - this is the one symptom that seems to be really consistent - haven't really timed it but it will NEVER lock up within 15-20 minutes of a fresh restart.

When it locks up I can move my mouse but nothing else responds. If I have music playing it will continue to play for a while before ceasing.

I have also reset the SMC.

Does this sound like a hardware or software problem?
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.