Mac Book pro acting weird

UKworkshop.co.uk

Help Support UKworkshop.co.uk:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

sawdust1

Established Member
Joined
15 Nov 2012
Messages
401
Reaction score
39
Location
devon
Hi folks, as title, Mac Book doing weird things over the last couple of months Like :-

6 times out of 10 the broadband connection symbol when you lift the lid is blank, to get connected
you have to shutdown and reboot, then all is ok for a while.
Sometimes when you shut the lid down you can hear it turning off, have to reboot to get going again.
On 2 occasions when left with lid down (ie at rest) something has made it get so hot it has switched off
and have had to place outside to cool before we can reboot.

Any idea's as its peeing us right off, checked for bugs and all clear, gave it a good clean up but still
the same.
 
I don't know the Mac Book myself but what springs to mind is overheating. There are a couple of common problems with this. One is dust. It builds up inside the unit and causes overheating. Have a google and there are articles that show how to check for this and get the dust out. The other issue that my daughters are always doing is putting their machines down on their beds (ie a soft surface) which blocks the vent holes and causes overheating. Can you hear the fan running continuously as this may indicate this as a problem.
 
Just remembered another machine that I fixed recently (Lenovo Thinkpad). The processor was overheating and it turned out that the heatsink on the processor was not thermally bonded to the IC. Got a small sachet of thermal paste and applied it and all good since.
 
Could be down to the fact that it's an antique!

Let the moths out of the wallet and get a chrome book!!

:lol: :lol:

Adidat
 
Thanks one and all.
Porker, done that as i've been inside to change the hinges recently and all is ok.
Scaredy, that been done as well.
Adidat, yep its antique, but until you come down and part with some more of you lovely £ notes it
wont be happening, oh wait you've had all my best gear !!!!
 
sawdust1":2751i6bm said:
Thanks one and all.
Porker, done that as i've been inside to change the hinges recently and all is ok.
Scaredy, that been done as well.
Adidat, yep its antique, but until you come down and part with some more of you lovely £ notes it
wont be happening, oh wait you've had all my best gear !!!!
Now is definitely the time to double-check you have backed-up everything on it that you don't want to lose.

Having done that, I think I would want to rebuild it, software- and operating-system-wise. But when you say it is getting hot when it is supposed to be suspended, that means something isn't as it should be and a process or subsystem is continuing to work when it probably shouldn't. It is old enough to have a power-hungry version of Bluetooth. That might well be causing issues. I would try disabling that temporarily, and see if the symptoms go away. You obviously are comfortable going inside these things, and thus know the layout: from feeling the outside of the case can you tell what is getting hot - power supply area, CPU, or something else?

TBH though, it also depends on how you are using it. There are a few oddities about Apple WiFi behaviour. Both my daughters, and my son and daughter-in-law have iOs phones, and one daughter has a recent (solid state) MacBook. There are also two iPads. Together they are easily capable of crashing my WiFi access point, to the extent that I now reboot the AP first thing in the morning (when they're all here together), as it will have probably crashed overnight, and that's quicker (on the way to the bathroom) than walking upstairs again after finding my tablet has no connectivity at breakfast!

The issue seems to be to do with video streaming (Netflix), and it is probably my AP's firmware (TP Link), but the fact remains that it doesn't happen with the many Linux boxes in the house, nor with the iPad, nor with Android devices - only when there are lots of Apple devices at one time.

Daughter #2's Macbook used to do this on its own, but ditching Virgin's "super" hub in favour of a Ubiquiti Edge firewall/router solved that one (Virgin's kit no longer does any routing nor WiFi).

That saga, combined with the current "too many apples" issue, is why I suspect Apple's WiFi implementation rather than merely my own WiFi kit. Clearly the TP Link unit doesn't fail gracefully, but that isn't the whole story, or so it seems.

On the face of it, it seems you have a hardware/firmware/software issue on the Macbook, but if there is loss of connectivity, that might not be the whole story.

Just sayin'.

E.

PS: if it is old enough to have a network connector (RJ45), or you have a Thundebolt network adaptor, try a cable instead of WiFi (and disable wifi too). That may help you narrow the problem down. You might conceivably have two distinct problems happening at once - wifi and some age-related hardware failure, causing it to not sleep/charge properly (might explain the heat). But without more detail, this is educated guessing!
 
Thanks Eric, it gets hot top left of the key pad and along the top edge with this glitch . Like now when lid was lifted no wifi connection so had to turn off and reboot then all ok.
Will try some of your suggestions.
 
May I suggest that you pose your question on here http://www.mac-forums.com/apple-notebooks/ rather than asking the poor people who have to put up with Mikerosaft stuff?

there are a lot of VERY well informed folk on there that may well be able to pin your problem down and actually know what they are talking about :roll: :roll:

My MacBook Pro is also an oldie and still going very strong so why change it? I will always remember the date it arrived, 10.10.2010 and it is now running on High Sierra, OS 10.13.4 which is the very latest OS. Nowt wrong with the oldies!

Just as a matter of interest, when you shut the lid on a MBP it goes into 'sleep mode'

If you do decide to ask on the mac-forums then it will help to put the model and OS in your question. I'm sure that you know where to find them, but just in case just click on the 'Apple', top left screen, and select 'About this Mac'

I'll duck now :twisted:
 
Don’t crow too loud, my mid 2009 MacBook Pro is now no longer upgradeable to the latest OS!

Rod
 

Latest posts

Back
Top