Freezing and purple colors corruption

[sage2k]

Hello there, long time lurker here.
/Scroll down to the two questions if you’re in a hurry/

I had my 2009 13’ MacBook Pro completely freeze on me and display corrupted colors on these freezes. This happened twice – on November 17th and 22nd. I did a PRAM and SMC reset, and reinstalled 10.6 on December 1st. Then I had the same freezing issue happen twice in mid and late January.

Occasion #1:

Occasion #2:

Occasion #3:
No pics, since I was on the phone when it happened and had to quickly restart it

Occasion #4:

I have the AppleCare protection plan and phoned there today on a separate topic of my battery’s capacity dropping to 73% after 279 cycles (Hello my 4th repair trip to Menlo Park Apple Retail Store).

On the topic of MBP freezing with graphics corruption, the AppleCare contact had me do a SMC reset and a safe boot (basically a driver cache update) justifying it probably being a software issue. Well, as I said I had the SMC reset and OS reinstalled in December, so…

My questions / tl;dr

1. Do you thint it's a hardware (logic board?) issue by looking at the photos?
2. Do you think I should push on this likely being a hardware issue to the Retail Store Genius since I have to get battery changed anyway?

 

[axu539]

Try a full reinstall of the OS. If the problem doesn't come back. Problem solved. If it does, you could have a dying GPU (but not for sure either). Also, the next time this does happen, try plugging the computer into an external monitor and see if it looks the same there.

 

[sage2k]

Try a full reinstall of the OS. If the problem doesn't come back. Problem solved. If it does, you could have a dying GPU (but not for sure either). Also, the next time this does happen, try plugging the computer into an external monitor and see if it looks the same there.

I did a reinstall in December and had the colored freezing happen in January again. I believe I did a clean install since the partition was created on December 1st:

Thanks for the idea of plugging in an external monitor upon freeze. I’ll try that if/when it happens next time.