To treat my wife, I had an SSD drive on her beloved 2011 17" MBP. Upon first use, it froze when opening photos and the cursor disappeared. After a restart, vertical purple lines appeared. After chatting with the company who instaled the SSD, they said it was a failing GPU. Essentially, death by costing too much to fix. The company is reluctant to associate the installation with the problems that followed it. Could they be right? The MBP did overheat this summer while off and just with power connected, but that's all. After cooling down, all was fine.
In an attempt to resolve the problems, I ran DU first aid, Onyx permissions, reset pram, apple hardware test, all to no avail. Finally, I reset SMC and the MBP returned to normal. Alas, only for a few hours of use, and the 'twilight zone' in photos reappeared. I discovered, however, that by unplugging the mag power connector, it immediately worked perfectly, with youtube and photos simultaneously without a hitch for hours. The secret is the power connection, I thought. Maybe not the GPU. Alas again, I disconnected the power and did an extended apple hardware test to see if the GPU would be flagged, but after humming along for 30 min., the purple lines returned and the BMP was frozen and very hot underneath. A pram reset has brought it back to normal while disconnected from power. So far, it's happy to all that is requested as long as the power is disconnected. I realize there an eighty-page thread on how to bypass the AMD GPU set, but that is beyond my little brain. Any thoughts? Thanks.
In an attempt to resolve the problems, I ran DU first aid, Onyx permissions, reset pram, apple hardware test, all to no avail. Finally, I reset SMC and the MBP returned to normal. Alas, only for a few hours of use, and the 'twilight zone' in photos reappeared. I discovered, however, that by unplugging the mag power connector, it immediately worked perfectly, with youtube and photos simultaneously without a hitch for hours. The secret is the power connection, I thought. Maybe not the GPU. Alas again, I disconnected the power and did an extended apple hardware test to see if the GPU would be flagged, but after humming along for 30 min., the purple lines returned and the BMP was frozen and very hot underneath. A pram reset has brought it back to normal while disconnected from power. So far, it's happy to all that is requested as long as the power is disconnected. I realize there an eighty-page thread on how to bypass the AMD GPU set, but that is beyond my little brain. Any thoughts? Thanks.