MacBook Pro Intermittent Black Screen or Loss of Video

10/13/11 By 16 Comments
MacBook Pro

MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2010): Intermittent black screen or loss of video

Apple has determined that a small number of MacBook Pro (15-inch, Mid 2010) computers may intermittently stop displaying video on the built-in display or on an external display connected to the MacBook Pro. In this situation, you may also see a restart warning message before the video is lost or the display turns black or gray. Affected computers were manufactured between April 2010 and February 2011.

Via Apple Support

Update: This issue has been addressed with the release of MacBook Pro Video Update 1.0 — but it’s only good if you’re running Lion (10.7.2+). If you choose to remain on Snow Leopard, you should make a Genius Bar appointment at your favorite Apple store to have the problem addressed. Chances are you’ll get a new motherboard out of it. See the support article for more information.

It seems the MacBook Pro/Lion Black Screen of Death™ has not been solved yet has been addressed. The good thing is Apple acknowledges it really is a problem.

I updated my Lion partition to 10.7.2 yesterday, and it seemed more stable than it was before – though I didn’t get much of a chance to really push the system. I was planning to update my production system this evening, but I think I might hold off a little longer until there’s more info from Apple in the article.

Has this bug caused you grief? How have you dealt with it?

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Mailplane Clean CSS Updated to v2.0.4

8/16/11 By Leave a Comment

If you’re a Mailplane Clean CSS user, I’ve updated the stylesheet for those of you who’ve enabled the preview pane lab feature. This will make the message body fill the entire space where the people widget was. I’ve also cleaned up some of the code in the file to make it more user friendly.

I’ve started hosting the project on Github, so you can download it directly from there now: https://github.com/jimmitchell/mailplane_css/. Just click on the “Download” button/link on that page.

Questions or bugs, note them in the comments.

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AppleScript to Add Empty Files in Finder Quickly

8/12/11 By Leave a Comment

Today I had the need to add a bunch of named text files to a folder in the Finder on my Mac. I found it a major pain that I had to open up BBEdit, make a new document, then save it to where I wanted it, and then manually copy & rename the files back in the Finder. A lot of effort to get 7 or 8 empty files with different names. [Read more...]

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Yasu 2.7.5 Released

8/10/11 By Leave a Comment

A minor update to Yasu has been released the fixes a bug introduced by changes made for Lion that prevented the app from quitting properly when the main window was closed.

Credit to Dr. Smoke for finding this one.

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Yasu Updated for Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion”

7/26/11 By 2 Comments

A Yasu update has been posted which addresses the handful of issues that popped up in the Lion system release. For the most part, very little changed under the hood, and Yasu still does what it does best as easily as it ever has.

One thing to note, if you try to update from within Yasu by automatic update and for some reason get an “Update Error – The update is improperly signed” error, then simply download from the Yasu page. I don’t know what’s going on there, but it’s probably something I did changing over to the new Sparkle update engine in the last update.

As always, if anything doesn’t seem right, let me know through my contact form. Use “Yasu & Lion” in the subject line so it catches my attention. Either that, or leave a comment here.

NOTE: I’ve added a “known issues” page for stuff that pops up…

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