Early-2011 MacBook Pro went haywire temporarily

[signofthetimes]

I have an early-2011 MacBook Pro. Several weeks ago swapped out the hard drive for a SSD and added 16GB of RAM (purchased from Crucial), both of which are supposed to be compatible w/ my model. Since then, it has seemed to work fine.

Today I was surfing the web, reading an article w/ an embedded video. All of the sudden the video stopped working, as if I had lost my internet connection. I checked the Wifi drop-down, and it looked really strange. It had all this text I have never seen before about "AirportTurnOffKey," etc., and no Wifi network was checked off. Then when I looked back at my browser tabs, they were acting bizarre (as seen in video). I closed out of everything and then noticed my computer's menu bar was blinking. I force shutdown, restarted, and now it seems to be running fine. The fan is running. I ran an Avast virus scan, which turned up nothing.

Video of The Haunting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQrcv0iU3Ic

Any ideas? Have you seen any of this strange behavior before?

 

[chrfr]

Any ideas? Have you seen any of this strange behavior before?

Lots of people have seen this and Apple now has a free repair program for it: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1848336/

 

[signofthetimes]

This doesn't look like the same problem, and my computer is a 13", so it's not on the list.

 

[chrfr]

This doesn't look like the same problem, and my computer is a 13", so it's not on the list.

In that case, reinstall your original RAM and see if it works without the graphic distortion.

 

[signofthetimes]

I'm not having graphic distortion. I'm having what I think is overheating. The video is of a series of strange things that happened last night. It's the first (and so far, only) time I've had things like that happen.

 

[Nermal]

Are you running Yosemite? I've had similar issues once or twice since upgrading, but they tend to go away again after rebooting.

 

[chrfr]

I'm not having graphic distortion. I'm having what I think is overheating. The video is of a series of strange things that happened last night. It's the first (and so far, only) time I've had things like that happen.

In any case, it's the sort of thing that seems likely to occur with faulty RAM. Since you've recently upgraded it, I'd put the old RAM back in as a test if the problem comes back.

 

[signofthetimes]

Are you running Yosemite? I've had similar issues once or twice since upgrading, but they tend to go away again after rebooting.

Yes, Yosemite. Since this is a new problem, I am going to monitor the problem for about a week, and if it continues, I will test out putting the old RAM back in and see what happens.