12-03-2009, 10:25 PM

Hey there,

It's my first post, so go easy on me!
So I'm not sure what happened, but on my new 13 inch Mid 2009 MacBook Pro, I got a sudden black screen.

After a few seconds I moved around on my trackpad, and the mouse cursor appeared.

I kinda panicked and held down my power button, shut down and restarted.

After restarting, I searched for a kernel panic thing "panic.log" in my finder, but nothing... so i'm hoping that means it wasn't a kernel panic.

After restarting the computer works just fine, although it has only been an hour since the incident.

I'm wondering if this is common, if this was just a weird crash, if this has happened to anyone at all?

I'm still under the complimentary 90-day apple care protection, so I'm planning on calling them tomorrow to figure this out, but was looking for some info in the meantime.

Also I looked at the console, and saw it had saved a crash report, but when I followed the path, there was none to be found (only one I had before with Microsoft Word, and in that Finder just restarted, the screen didn't go black or anything.)

Any help would be appreciated!
Thanks

12-03-2009, 10:48 PM

Do you have "hot" corners activated? If you do, moving the mouse cursor to one of those corners could turn the screen off depending on the setting.

Select "System Preferences", "Desktop & Screensaver". Press the "hot corners" tab and check to see if you have any corner activated. (I have my left lower corner set to "Put the display to sleep".)

Also, you may have your display set to go to sleep or turn off after XX minutes. Check that too.

Regards.

12-03-2009, 10:58 PM

thanks for replying.

You made a good point about the hot corners thing, I do have it activated, but only for the dashboard in the top left corner, and nothing else for the other corners.

I do have my display to turn off after the default time, but I was using the computer while it happened, so it couldn't have been that.

any other ideas?

12-06-2009, 02:58 PM

okay, so it happened again... sucks

but I think this time I've pinpointed why it happened.

I was using the application UnrarX version 2.2 and unraring something, I turned away for a second or two, and there was the black screen. I believe the first time it happened I was using UnrarX as well.

I did the same thing as before (moving my finger on the trackpad), and the cursor came back on the black screen.

I waited a bit longer than last time, but still the computer didn't respond... so I held down the power button and restarted.

It works fine right now, been only a few minutes this time...

Anyone else have this problem?

I even called apple care, and they couldn't pinpoint the problem.

This is terrible!
Anyone HELP!

EDIT: I think I found the crashreport (using the sidebar), and it has to deal QTKitServer as the process...
has anyone dealt with this?

01-05-2010, 12:01 PM

The black screen problem is all over the discussion groups. It affects all types and ages of Macs.

My MBP started doing it after I installed SL. It does it randomly and infrequently. By randomly, I mean at various times under various circumstances. Resetting the PRAM does not fix it.

I can't recover without a cold boot. When the screen goes black, after sitting for example, when I hit the F keys 9-11, it will come back on, but I as soon as I click on something it will go back off.

This is not a hardware problem, it is a SL software problem.