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My late 08 Macbook Pro is currently having brain surgery for a defective 9600GT. I also have seldom used the 9600GT (maybe 4-5 times) since buying the computer, and 24 hours after switching it last week, it locked up and gave me distorted graphics in safari.

FWIW my machine's serial number comes out as a week 46, but when they hooked up the displayport tester at the genius bar, it showed a manufacturing date of week 25. This may be the actual date of the display port and thus logic board manufacture, which is months before the machines were built, so take that as you wish; probably one of the earliest unibodies with the crap leftover NVIDIA garbage.
 
Hate to revive a thread but i'v been having this issue since purchase in late 08. Just now trying to get it fixed with a a deployment and plenty of work. There are enormous threads on this but their size makes them useless if you dont feel like reading for 3 hours. Has Apple acknowledged this issue? What should the process be to get this fixed?
 
I've actually had more problems with the 9400m. No issues at all with the 9600.
 
I've actually had a weird GPU issue in the middle of last month but didn't report it because i'd never seen this before and i've yet to come across it again nor could i really get anything abnormal from console logs (i.e. it'd be difficult to convince a genius)

Here are the pics and two videos of the problem can be found here

I restarted the machine and the issue disappeared and has yet to resurface
 

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My 9600 is also randomly failing, basically about once a week, quite regularly. When it fails, one of the following happens:

- Last sound played keeps looping while system completely unresponsive, requires hard reboot
- System becomes slower and slower over a period of around 15 seconds and then completely freezes, then reboots itself
- System reboots without any warning whatsoever
- Kernel Panic requiring hard reboot
- System suddenly powers off without warning and doesn't reboot automatically

I only noticed this problem after upgrading to Snow Leopard, so I thought it was a software issue, and while my computer was still under warranty I didn't get it fixed because I never thought it would be hardware... Stupid me.

It might just be that I started using the 9600 more often after upgrading to SL by coincidence.

The 9400 works fine.

My computer is a Late 2008 Unibody MacBook Pro, 4GB RAM and 320 GB HDD, with a 2.53 GHz CPU.

At the Apple store they said they would need a week to determine the cause of the problem, but the solution seems to be to replace the entire motherboard which I cannot pay for.

I'm just wondering whether there would still be a way of getting it repaired for free, since here in Europe there's a law about companies being required to provide 2 or 3 years of warranty on computers... But I don't know how to "use" that warranty and how to tell Apple about that law. They seem to not know about it.
 
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