MBP Freezing, Crashing and kernel panics

Hi all,

My macbook pro has gone haywire over the past 24 hours. It is regularly (sometimes more than once a minute) freezing, suddenly shutting itself down or suffering from kernel panics. Panics are relatively rare, not had them since yesterday.

It's a mid 2010 15" macbook pro running OSX 10.6.8, 8GB of crucial RAM which has been in there over 1.5 years and a samsung SSD which has been in about 4 months. Temps haven't got too high recently, they did get rather hot a month ago after a process went mad and took up 100% CPU for far too long until i realised. Since buying the laptop new, I have had the logic board replaced by apple about 2 years ago due to a fault.

Can't see anything in the logs at all, nothing is being written in there before it crashes. It just becomes completely unresponsive and makes the occasional loud static noise from the speakers.

I did notice about an hour ago when it froze up for the millionth time that I seemed to be getting a code from the white power light on the front of the case? 3 short flashes being repeated, I understand if these were startup beeps that would indicate a RAM problem. Are these flashes the same as the beeps?

I have tried running rember to test the RAM, but I can't really get the computer to run properly for long enough to finish the test.

Can't run AHT because I no longer have an optical drive (the original HDD is now in that slot), so not really sure what to do now! Hopefully someone can advise me on the possible fault code mentioned above

It's unlikely the memory you've been using in the machine for 1.5 years has suddenly gone bad or intermittent but certainly not impossible. I would be more inclined to suspect the Samsung SSD especially if that's your boot drive.

Why don't you try to boot the machine from an external hard drive if possible? That would tell us if the machine logic board and memory is OK and might isolate the problem somewhat.

Back up suggestion on SSD. Have had a Kingston fail at three months and a G.Skill Falcon on install.

Yes, the SSD is the boot drive. I've not been able to try booting from an external drive yet but it's on the to do list.

I'm going to try re-seating the RAM, I've noticed a large number of the crashes happen when I move the laptop. Further more I got a proper beep error code when trying to restart from a crash earlier - 3 beeps repeated, which indicates a memory problem? How annoying that 8GB of RAM is now more than double the price of when I bought it originally!

The three beeps do indicate a memory problem. Hopefully, reseating the modules will cure that. Memory prices rise on modules that are no longer popular and in mass production. It's just the way it goes...

Tried reseating, didn't improve things. Just ordered and fitted some new crucial ram, all working well so far. Time will tell

Update: new ram did not work. Been to the apple store with it today, they could not find a problem with it but suspected hard drive or, more likely, logic board.
I've tried unplugging the 2nd hard drive, no difference. Next plan is to clone the SSD to the 2nd hard drive, then unplug the SSD and boot from the 2nd drive. If that doesn't fix it, then either have the logic board replaced or (vomit) buy a cheap windows laptop to get me through the rest of the year.

Fixed

Fixed. Final update for anybody searching with similar symptoms.

I had to have the logic board replaced with a new one. Had this done by apple at the not inconsiderable cost of £391.20. Have also noticed that I have stage light effect at the bottom of the display, not a chance that's getting fixed haha.

Apple didn't say what the problem was with the last logic board, so can't help there.

Thanks for posting back and sorry to hear your wallet is a lot thinner after the Apple repair. If they replaced the logic board, chances are it was the graphics processor chip that was causing the problem. Either that or they couldn't determine the cause and just replaced the board as a shotgun repair.