Help! MacBook shuts off on its own. (2024)

Had it on playing pandora for maybe 2 hours today. Sitting on a carpeted (and clean) floor. Was plugged into the wall the whole time. After I was done with pandora I tried to hop on barf, had maybe 12-15 tabs open on various sites (iirc 4-5 cafe husky, 1 motoxotica, 2-3 calguns, and a few other supermoto shopping pages). Within maybe 1-2 min of trying to load another webpage poof. Screen flashes white and the whole laptop shut off. Turned it back on, it loaded osx normally, auto reloaded chrome and gave me the "chrome did not shut down properly, restore tabs?" Message. I tried to restore tabs and before it could finish loading them all it shut down again. Thought maybe it was overheating, left to go eat dinner, came back an hour and a half later, tried to turn it on again. Loaded normally, started chrome...didn't reload tabs this time, just opened chrome and waited. Boom, shut down again within a couple minutes. Tried turning back on...didn't even finish startup sequence this time it shut down after like 20 seconds.

f*ck. Right at the end of spring break. Right before classes are about to start and I have mid terms for programming and math (with both my Calc textbook and discrete math textbook being PDFs saved on my laptop).

Don't have a separate desktop at the moment. Help?

Could be just about anything. Dunno much about Macs, but suggest you open it up and suck out the dust bunnies with a vacuum. Make sure the fans are working. Those are the common causes of overheating.

Other than that there can be memory, motherboard, disk and CPU failures and loose connections. I'd google for reports of similar problems with that particular model and try to find out what the most common reasons/solutions are.

rodr said:

Could be just about anything. Dunno much about Macs, but suggest you open it up and suck out the dust bunnies with a vacuum. Make sure the fans are working. Those are the common causes of overheating.

Other than that there can be memory, motherboard, disk and CPU failures and loose connections. I'd google for reports of similar problems with that particular model and try to find out what the most common reasons/solutions are.

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Don't use a vacuum. Use canned air. Vacuums generate huge amounts of static electricity. That's bad for sensitive electronics.

Based on the data, I'd assume overheating.

NorCalAthlete said:

Thought maybe it was overheating, left to go eat dinner, came back an hour and a half later, tried to turn it on again. Loaded normally, started chrome...didn't reload tabs this time, just opened chrome and waited. Boom, shut down again within a couple minutes.

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I thought so too. But it had plenty of time to cool down and was completely cold when I tried it after dinner. Similarly it shut itself off a few times this morning, after being off all night.

I talked to the Apple tech support (and got someone who spoke perfect English yay) and we reset a couple things.

1. Forget what he called it, but he had me unplug the power cord, take the battery out, then hold the power button for 5-10 seconds.

2. After reinstalling everything, hold command + option + P + R and hit power, continue holding. Should reset something in memory or whatever.

Step 1 worked as expected according to him. Step 2 did not. It was supposed to restart itself and do the boot up "chime" 3x while holding the keys, then let go and it would start normally. So instead he had me hold shift, boot into safe mode, couple other random little things he asked me for data on, then basically said ok, you should be ok to back up the computer now, but definitely take it into a genius bar asap and replace the hard drive - but whatever that step 2 was supposed to fix needs to be looked at too apparently.

Appointment made for Monday. Crossing fingers...

resetting PRAM

helps on a lot of things

Yeah, that's what it was thanks.

So I'm shopping around for SSDs....any 2.5" SSD should fit in my laptop right? 15" macbook pro, 2008 model? I'm currently trying to figure out what's taking up 200 gb on the current hard drive, because I'm reasonably sure most of it is pictures and videos that can be easily moved to an external, and a 128gb SSD should suffice.

NorCalAthlete said:

Yeah, that's what it was thanks.

So I'm shopping around for SSDs....any 2.5" SSD should fit in my laptop right? 15" macbook pro, 2008 model? I'm currently trying to figure out what's taking up 200 gb on the current hard drive, because I'm reasonably sure most of it is pictures and videos that can be easily moved to an external, and a 128gb SSD should suffice.

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I had the same problem on my 2008 aluminum macbook but my hard drive completely failed from one hour to the next. I got an ssd and moved anything that is important onto a variation of Box (school)/Dropbox (automatic photo backup)/googleDrive (nonsense) and got a 128gb ssd. No problem ever since. I dont havr many files outside out maybe 6-8 gbs of music and at any given time I'm using 80-90gb on zer hard drive. Check slick deals, there are a few deals for 256gb SSD's.

15 tabs open on Chrome? WTF! each tab is 100k of memory poof! I believe you totally sunk your system with to much use and it should be fine. Get rid of Chrome!

You could also check out the even logs in console.

Entoptic said:

15 tabs open on Chrome? WTF! each tab is 100k of memory poof! I believe you totally sunk your system with to much use and it should be fine. Get rid of Chrome!

You could also check out the even logs in console.

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what do you recommend for browsing?

Yakoo752 said:

what do you recommend for browsing?

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Firefox. arty Alghough apparently Brendan Eich supported Prop 8. :| Then again they gave money to my adviser who is gay. Weird situation all around.

Entoptic said:

15 tabs open on Chrome? WTF! each tab is 100k of memory poof! I believe you totally sunk your system with to much use and it should be fine. Get rid of Chrome!

You could also check out the even logs in console.

Click to expand...

firefox is a much, MUCH bigger memory hog if you have many tabs and never close your browser (like me).

Yakoo752 said:

resetting PRAM

helps on a lot of things

Click to expand...

LOL ya PRAM. Haven't even heard that in close to 10 years. Last time I flashed pram was on an OS 9.1 system. I didn't even know it still was an option in OSX.

JackTheTripper said:

LOL ya PRAM. Haven't even heard that in close to 10 years. Last time I flashed pram was on an OS 9.1 system. I didn't even know it still was an option in OSX.

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Sad Mac for you Preston!

JackTheTripper said:

LOL ya PRAM. Haven't even heard that in close to 10 years. Last time I flashed pram was on an OS 9.1 system. I didn't even know it still was an option in OSX.

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don't forget SMC or NVRAM

They probably had Peter reset both SMC and PRAM. Resetting SMC helps with a lot of power management stuff.

mike23w said:

firefox is a much, MUCH bigger memory hog if you have many tabs and never close your browser (like me).

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This. If I run 10-12 tabs in FF, I have to periodically force close it and reopen it, as it gets so slowww.

I use Safari when I can.