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iUseMacBooks

macrumors member
Original poster
Jun 2, 2015
48
8
Hi everyone, I just had a problem with my MacBook Air (Early 2014) that I've never experienced before, and I'm just wondering if anyone knows what would typically cause it to happen.

I was writing an essay (I'm in College) and my screen suddenly went black. Then, after about five seconds, a message written in small, white font appeared on the screen, saying "Your computer has restarted due to a problem" with no other details.

It started right back up, and everything seems OK, I'm just wondering if this is a precursor to something bad? I mainly just use the computer for web browsing, email, word docs, things like that. Before this MacBook Air, I had a MacBook Pro non-Retina, and I never had a problem with it or saw this message before.

I'm probably just being paranoid, but I just wanted to check here to see what people thought. Thanks.
 
Hi everyone, I just had a problem with my MacBook Air (Early 2014) that I've never experienced before, and I'm just wondering if anyone knows what would typically cause it to happen.

I was writing an essay (I'm in College) and my screen suddenly went black. Then, after about five seconds, a message written in small, white font appeared on the screen, saying "Your computer has restarted due to a problem" with no other details.

It started right back up, and everything seems OK, I'm just wondering if this is a precursor to something bad? I mainly just use the computer for web browsing, email, word docs, things like that. Before this MacBook Air, I had a MacBook Pro non-Retina, and I never had a problem with it or saw this message before.

I'm probably just being paranoid, but I just wanted to check here to see what people thought. Thanks.

Don't worry too much about it. It was most likely a kernel panic, which the majority of time is caused by some error on the software side of things. Your Mac is most likely fine. If it happens frequently, then you should take some steps to try and diagnose the issue, but one random kernel panic is not an issue.
 
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Don't worry too much about it. It was most likely a kernel panic, which the majority of time is caused by some error on the software side of things. Your Mac is most likely fine. If it happens frequently, then you should take some steps to try and diagnose the issue, but one random kernel panic is not an issue.

Thanks for the response, that's helpful and reassuring.
 
Thanks for the response, that's helpful and reassuring.

Yep, as poster above said, no need to panic. A high uptime on OS X (time since last shutdown) can occasionally compound problems, so just shut down every few days with reopen Windows when logging back in disabled.

You can do a quick check through SMART utility to verify your SSD isn't corrupted, and if that's okay, a quick volume verification on your Macintosh HD partition through Disk Utility should be okay. Don't worry if that comes out red as it's fairly easy and quick to repair - let us know if you need instructions for that.

If all comes back okay, no need to worry. Just a gentle reassurance that the above troubleshooting steps won't take more than a few minutes - best to err on the side of caution is all. :)
 
Yep, as poster above said, no need to panic. A high uptime on OS X (time since last shutdown) can occasionally compound problems, so just shut down every few days with reopen Windows when logging back in disabled.

You can do a quick check through SMART utility to verify your SSD isn't corrupted, and if that's okay, a quick volume verification on your Macintosh HD partition through Disk Utility should be okay. Don't worry if that comes out red as it's fairly easy and quick to repair - let us know if you need instructions for that.

If all comes back okay, no need to worry. Just a gentle reassurance that the above troubleshooting steps won't take more than a few minutes - best to err on the side of caution is all. :)

Thank you -- so much great, helpful information here. Now that I think about it, it has been a while since I've shut down the computer when not using it, I should probably do that more often. I will definitely watch the computer closely to see if anything else out of the ordinary happens. Thanks again.
 
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