After two trips to the King of Prussia Apple store, the MacBook Pro experience continues to erode. Each trip is 45 minutes, so I’ve invested 3 hours for the two there-and-back trips; a real productivity killer when you factor in the work I’ve lost due to kernel panics and application crashes.
The first time around I thought we had the problem licked. The second time, the techs found no issues. Friday afternoon, the system degraded again and I spent about 2.5 hours on the phone with a Apple support representative. He was extremely helpful and sympathetic, but unfortunately is as stymied as everyone else on the issue. He suspects that the Apple store techs never ran the Extended hardware test as that’s where we’re seeing the issues.
First off, thanks again for everyone’s many helpful suggestions and comments. I’m certain that it’s not an issue with my environment since that’s out of play during the Apple hardware test. For the third time, the hardware test is showing issues that appear to be associated with the memory, the main logic board, or both. Here’s the odd part: the test results themselves are inconsistent.
My support rep had me run the hardware test with every combination of the RAM modules in and out of the MBP. First we would remove one and run the test, then we would swap with the other and run the test, etc…. The results were interesting:
- The hardware test never failed when only one RAM module was in the computer. Therefore, we couldn’t isolate if one of the modules was bad.
- We ran the hardware test three times on the phone with both RAM modules in the computer. Two times it failed and one time it passed.
The outcome is that I won’t be wasting any more driving time. I received a postage paid box from Apple and the unit is going in for extensive testing and (hopeful) repair. This is the third time in three weeks that the unit is in for repair, and while some readers thought I might get a new replacement due to the three strikes, I ultimately don’t mind if the unit I bought is fixed to 100% capabilities. I don’t need a new unit; I need a working unit. I don’t expect to have the unit back for a week, so everybody cross your fingers with me that we have some final resolution. Maybe we can create our own "reality distortion field" around my MacBook Pro and trick it into working. ;)
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