Gray Screen of Death

Okay I've had my MBP for about 2 months now and it recently started crashing frequently. Its crashed twice in the last two hours. I have only been using it for surfing the web and a little word processing. It keeps doing that thing where the whole screen darks and asks me to restart. Whats going on with this I hoped switching from Windows to OSX would end all my crashing issues. I'm starting to think this computer has more issues than my old pc. What gives???

There is no such thing as a "screen of death"...apparently that is something that happens in the windows world.

I've never experienced what you're talking about. Personally I'd make an appointment at the "Genius Bar" at your local Apple store ad have them take you through the paces or at a minimum show them your problem and go from there. Good luck.

First off, ALL computers and ALL operating systems crash from time to time. No operating system is going to end that reality for you. :black:

On to the matter at hand, it sounds as if you are experiencing a kernel panic. The reasons for this are varied and sometimes difficult to pinpoint. I would suggest taking a look at this article on the Apple Support Site and seeing if you can track down the culprit:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25392

This article will help you resolve some of the issues as well:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106214

I know exactly what you're talking about, it's called a Kernel Panic and it's the Mac equivalent of the BSoD.

My MBP has experienced about half a dozen of them in two and a half months. If it happens a couple more times, I'll probably break down and bring the computer to the Apple Store.

ToddG said:

I know exactly what you're talking about, it's called a Kernel Panic and it's the Mac equivalent of the BSoD.

My MBP has experienced about half a dozen of them in two and a half months. If it happens a couple more times, I'll probably break down and bring the computer to the Apple Store.

Click to expand...

You should take your mbp to the genius bar soon, I would never settle for any amount of kernel panics other then 1 in a few week period of time. There could be something wrong.

You guys are correct. I checked out the apple site about Kernel Panic and thats exactly what it is. Thanks for your help. I was beginning to get a little uneasy about it.

PBG4 -- You're absolutely correct and that would be the wisest thing I could do. So far, the only crashes have been while running MSIE (specifically, an ActiveX mail program) in Parallels while simultaneously running Safari. I have also done those things simultaneously without crashing, but my guess it that ActiveX is the culprit on some level.

I guess I'm just so skeptical after all those years of Dell/MS "support," my expectations are really very low. I'm not interested in hearing that my Speck case or Marware pad have given me a virus and the solution is to wipe my drive and start all over.

ToddG said:

PBG4 -- You're absolutely correct and that would be the wisest thing I could do. So far, the only crashes have been while running MSIE (specifically, an ActiveX mail program) in Parallels while simultaneously running Safari. I have also done those things simultaneously without crashing, but my guess it that ActiveX is the culprit on some level.

I guess I'm just so skeptical after all those years of Dell/MS "support," my expectations are really very low. I'm not interested in hearing that my Speck case or Marware pad have given me a virus and the solution is to wipe my drive and start all over.

Click to expand...

See Todd, in the end, it's ALWAYS M$'s fault.

Should have known.

If I'm not mistaken, the crash log might give you info on what caused the crash. But sometimes the message is so bloody cryptic it's really hard to tell what happened.

Might be RAM that has gone bad. That is my only experience with kernel panics, btw: RAM installed by the Mac reseller where I bought my ol' iMac G4 went bad on me and it went from kernel panic to kernel panic. At first, I didn't know what the heck was going on. I brought it back to the store, they changed the RAM but I still had to reinstall the OS (10.2.x Jaguar at the time) as it was so messed up with all the crashes, I couldn't salvage anything from the system.