My 15" unibody MacBook Pro with the 9400m NVidia chipset and discrete 9600m started acting up on Monday. First the optical drive would just quit intermittently, no longer showing up in the Disk Utility and Hardware profiler. Then the screen started blacking out randomly as if there was a loose wire. Interestingly this would only happen with the laptop on my lap, not on my desk. Later I noticed that I could actually get the screen to black out by shifting the weight to my left knee, and get it come back to life by shifting the weight back to my right knee.
Maybe this is completely idiotic, but it leaves me with the following conclusion: The solder connections on the NVidia chipset must be starting to crumble. The chip would be the common hub where both the display and the SATA bridge meet.
Fortunately I have AppleCare so I will call customer support later today and try to get it fixed by Apple. I was wondering though if anyone here had a similar problem? I know that with some of the older iBooks and PowerBooks there were a lot of failures with bad solder connections, that's when I started considering the extended AppleCare mandatory.
Maybe this is completely idiotic, but it leaves me with the following conclusion: The solder connections on the NVidia chipset must be starting to crumble. The chip would be the common hub where both the display and the SATA bridge meet.
Fortunately I have AppleCare so I will call customer support later today and try to get it fixed by Apple. I was wondering though if anyone here had a similar problem? I know that with some of the older iBooks and PowerBooks there were a lot of failures with bad solder connections, that's when I started considering the extended AppleCare mandatory.