MacBook Pro A1151 hard freezes and reboots

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Just inherited an old MacBook Pro A1151 2.16GHz that I was hoping to fix up and use for Final Cut. The power button gets jammed and caused it to get stuck in a reboot loop once, put a few pieces of electrical tape on it to provide support and prevent shorting so it hasn't been a problem. Anyway, the computer hard freezes shortly after booting the operating system. Sometimes it reboots after hard freezing but not always. Booted a Leopard disc once and had it run until I opened Disk Utility, then hard froze. My first instinct is to run TechTool and test the RAM, but it restarts before I can even get a GUI. Verbose mode gives a "systemShutdown false" message just before rebooting if it gets far enough.
 
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If im not mistaken that model is the 17 inch version of the early 2006 MacBook pro. It has the radeon x1600 graphics chip in it.
If I had to take a guess I would say it is either getting hot or the ram is at fault. Also the radeon x1600 graphics chip in those older MacBook pros gets hot fast and will cause a crash after only a few minutes of use. It could need a good cleaning out to remove the dust form the fans and heat sinks. I have not run across a MacBook pro from 2006 yet that is clean on the heatsinks A 7 year old laptop that has never been cleaned out is gonna get hot pretty quick. The freezing is a common issue with the graphics chip getting hot.
 
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kahlil88
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My second guess was overheating, but in my experience this usually causes the machine to shut off rather than reboot...at least if it's the CPU that's boiling. Not very much dust, but the thermal compound is very dry and hard. Gonna clean the chips and heatsink with isopropyl alcohol and apply a fresh coat of Arctic Silver.
 
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Still had problems after applying new thermal compound and eventually gave up...but it dawned on me that it might be the hard drive cable. I've seen them go bad in iBooks and stumbled across a thread on this forum where someone had suggested replacing the cable any time the drive is replaced. Didn't take it very seriously until just yesterday when I was upgrading a friend's hard drive who has a MacBook, and noticed how strong the glue is that holds it to the drive! Easy to damage if you're not careful...
 

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