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Darn! mid 2010 15" MBP is dead/dying

J

johnh57

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jul 6, 2011
130
30
Montana
The ol' 2010 MBP is showing it's age. It won't start up long enough to run diagnostics. Sometimes it freezes and gives the 3 beeps, pause, repeat infinitely (memory?), sometimes it restarts, sometimes it just shuts off, sometimes the screen, touchpad, everything just freezes.

It has the capacitor failure in the GPU going on, I bypassed the GPU using the patch last year sometime ( https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...for-kernel-panic-of-macbook-pro-2010.2044304/ ) Trying to clean things up yesterday I did a nvram reset, SMC reset, and ran all apple updates and have lost the gpu patch. I did the csrutil disable in terminal and it said I had to do that in safe mode. I have not pursued that yet. I did try starting in safe mode yesterday and it just gives the start up tone over and over again without going into start up.

I think it's time to replace. There is a simply mac Apple partner store in town I may run by and see what they think. I don't really 'need' a pro - but I like the retina display. Looks like on the refurbed ones you can get a oct 2016 13" i7 8gb/512 or a june 117 i5 16gb/512 for the same price (more than I want to spend, but that's a different issue).

If it weren't for the lack of a retina display I could live with an air for what I do with it.


It has a new (last fall) battery, 8 gb of Crucial memory, and a Samsung EVO 500gb ssd.
 
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Have you considered having a competent repair shop change the capacitor?

I also had a 2010 15" with a faulty capacitor. I paid $75 CAD to have a local Mac repair person change the capacitor to an aluminium unit and it's been fine for the past two months.

The machine is still quick and stable.
 
I may try that. I have the capacitor, ordered it last fall. I have the solder and the de-soldering ribbon. There were several capacitors discussed, hopefully I got one that will work.

At this point there really isn't much to lose by trying.

I did take it to the Simply Mac store this morning. They were unable to run their diagnostics on it. The service guy said it was hanging about where it would be doing tests of the GPU.

The Simply Mac store said they would not do the capacitor work - that's forbidden by Apple. They would be happy to swap out a logic board if I wanted to go buy one (for about $400 - $500 for the board + their labor)
 
Forbidden by apple? Didn't know that.

Of course they want to hose you for a new logic board rather than have you pay $50 to have a fully functional machine.

Yes, it will always fail the gpu test. Same thing happened when I had the apple store run the test on mine.
 
It's forbidden because Apple doesn't allow their authorized repair centers to perform component level board repairs such as micro-soldering, reflows, etc. Authorized Apple Repair Centers are only authorized to do logic board replacements if there are ANY issues with the logic board.
 
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That's too bad because I am sure there are technicians working at authorised repair centres that know about this capacitor issue and are proficient at board-level repairs.
 
There are plenty of 3rd party shops that might be willing to repair it. But for the $200-300 they might charge I wonder if you could buy a working used one.
 
I ordered caps some time ago - but it looks like the caps I ordered have given people problems. Will have to look into a better cap.
 
depends where you live, but most of 3rd party services has flat rate logic board repair and it's around $200-300 + TAX

you cannot force repair service to replace one capacitor
 
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Yes, I was given contact information for a board repair service. Price is reasonable even for an old machine.

I have the correct capacitor coming, I may take a run at re-doing the capacitor. It doesn't seem to be all that difficult. If that doesn't work I'll have to decide whether or not to pursue a more involved repair.
 
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