Just bought a new MacBook and love it, especially the ability to run Windows through the Parallels system, but there’s one thing that’s driving me totally crazy: every once in a while it randomly shuts down with no warning. It’s $#@$#@$@# frustrating! What’s going on?
Apparently, there was a design fault with the heatsink in the first generation of MacBook and that’s what you’re experiencing: the system gets hot enough and shuts down so it doesn’t fry any circuitry. So in a weird sort of way, the shutdown is better than the alternative, but I can imagine how incredibly annoying it would be to constantly live under the threat of losing work or worse.
Fortunately, there’s a well-known fix that Apple can apply to your MacBook which involves swapping out the heatsink with another heatsink. They wrote about the shutdown problem in what could possibly be the world’s shortest knowledgebase article on the site: MacBook: Shuts down intermittently.
Their suggestion? Contact AppleCare for help. Or do what I do and call 800-SOS-APPL and schedule a pickup and repair over the phone.
Note that it’s possible that MacBooks purchased today could still have this heatsink problem, and the way to test it is to push the device and see if you can get it to overheat. Here’s one way that the folks at MacFixIt suggest:
- Open Applications –> Utilities –> Terminal.
- Type in the following command: yes > /dev/null & followed by Return. It’ll look like this:
$ yes > /dev/null &
[1] 9881 - Now type in the command a few more times and you’ll have a number of processor-intensive commands slamming along in the background.
It should take no more than 15 minutes for your MacBook to either shutdown or demonstrate that you aren’t plagued by the intermittent shutdown problem. If you’re okay, then type in kill %1 %2 %3 for as many jobs as you started up (e.g., what I’m showing would work if you started three jobs. If you did four, add “%4” too).
The Apple service document for this problem explains to the technicians that: “The new heatsink part is now available for order in GSX and should ship later this week: 076-1243 Heatsink Kit, with Sponge, 1.0 mm Conn The MacBook (13-inch) Service Manual has been updated with this information and is available via links on AppleCare Service Source.”
SO now you know. Get that heat sink fixed and enjoy that sweet little laptop! Me? I want one, but I’m waiting until the tablet form-factor MacBook is released… 🙂
I have a Macbook 13.3, 2ghz,Intel Core Duo #A1811
I had the shutdown problem but the heatsink was melting the isolation off a wire on a sensor connected to the heatsink and causing a short. I covered the wire and moved it away from the heatsink.
No more shutdowns but still running hot.
I have a heatsink on the way.
I also found a bunch of lent in the fin of the heatsink near the fan.
I recently purchased this macbook on Ebay and thought it had the firmware problem because of the OS on the laptop was consistent with report.
But I love this thing and i can write music without the latency issues except for the overheating slowing thing down 😉
What good does having a password on my laptop do if the power button can be held down to reset the computer and allow access?
my computer is running hot and in the last few weeks it has shut down three times. I have a Compaq Presario run windows xp. i thought it may be holding the laptop on my lap (the air could not circulate) was the problem but after I read this post I remembered i was playing a game each time it went down. however the game is the only thing I had running. I have a total of 74.5 GB and my free space is 50.9 GB my memory is 1.60 GHz, 384 MB of RAM. can you help?
Good tip Dave, thanks
I just got a new macbook, so I gave your experiment a try. I didn’t get a shutdown after 20 minutes of running 10 iterations of that process, so I guess I’m fine with the heatsink
However, my fan on this computer runs *a lot* — even though I’ve been trying to run as few applications on this as possible at any given time — especially until I get my extra RAM installed this weekend.
So something is making this puppy run hot.
I installed Parallels for Mac Desktop and then Win 2K so I can run Camtasia once I get enough RAM. Think that might be contributing to the extensive fan-running somehow?
– Amy Gahran