Woes of MacBook Pro Unibody Owner

A little more on my MacBook Pro woes…

Since I’ve had this MacBook Pro Unibody 2.6 Ghz with 4 GB RAM purchased in September of 2009, I’ve had to back it up, completely wipe the internal HD and restore five times.

Twice I’ve completely zeroed the drive for extra measure. I even went so far as to start entirely from scratch once hoping it would finally fix my issues, but to no avail.

In the time owning this machine, I’ve ended up with a “keys out of order” error more times than I can remember. Running a single user “fsck” at boot usually won’t fix the problem either. I laid out $100 for DiskWarrior to finally resolve that. Still, through all of it, I seem to keep coming up with issues on a regular basis.

I’ve never had this much trouble with any Mac I’ve owned, ever.

Here are the symptoms that eventually lead up to the disk to going bad: When putting the machine to sleep for more than an hour by closing the clamshell, upon waking by re-opening, the MacBook Pro will spontaneously log itself out, sometimes only once, other times it will happen multiple times in a row (I think I counted 5 logouts once).

Usually, after that excitement, any application I try to launch will immediately crash. I don’t keep any apps running when putting the unit to sleep anymore. I’ve lost too much work because of it. Twice I’ve gotten kernel panics instead of spontaneous log outs. It is far more likely this machine will wake with an issue than it is not to.

Logs allude to crashed threads in windowserver, CoreGraphics, as well as a video driver. I’ve tried removing every single system add-on I’ve ever installed, but still have problems. I’ve also cleared every single cache I can get my hands on and then some.

Currently, I’m testing the memory using Memtest. When I left for work this morning, it hadn’t found any problems yet. If it were as simple as a bad memory module I’d be thrilled. To be honest, I think the problem lies in the 7200 RPM drive I had installed as a BTO option from Apple. It’s always seemed to be a little finicky.

Because of this lemony Mac, I’ve lost countless hours; falling way behind schedule on a project that I promised would be delivered a month ago.

If Memtest doesn’t do the trick, I’ve decided it’s time to visit the Genius Bar at my local Apple store. I’ve had good luck with them helping me solve issues on other machines. Maybe they can save this one too. I just hope I don’t have to send it back to China to get fixed, because that would put me another month behind schedule on an overdue project.

More to follow, I’m sure…