MacBook Pro Issues

Just got an email from my parents regrading an issue with their MacBook Pro, they were having an issue a while ago with it powering on but were then out of town for a while and left it turned off.

Dad powered it on today and ran the hardware daigs which said that there were no issues but after a reboot they have some serious screen corruption going on so I’m thinking its the motherboard.

Dad did say however that the fan is running full on so maybe I just need to take the back off it and give the fans a good clean.

I’ve attached photos of the symptoms of the problem, any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Let me guess - mid 2011? That’ll be a dead or dying GPU.

YUP. That’s pretty textbook.

Yep think it is a 2011 - guess I’ll need to give them the bad news then. On the plus side at least I can get the data from the machine for them.

You mean, they didn’t have a backup? I would tell them to fix that in future.

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If you can pull it apart, there are companies in the UK that’ll put a new chip on for you with the proper re-balling machines. Whether it is worth saving the money towards a new machine is something to consider though.

Yes they have backups - but their last one was a few weeks ago, they managed to get the machine back up and running again today (temporarily) and now have an up to date backup.

I’ve had one of these MacBook Pros with the bad GPU sitting around for a while but I came across this article yesterday.

It works pretty well but with the basic fix there are some issues.

Sleeping the laptop with the lid closed, wake from sleep and external video doesn’t work.

There are additional steps which seem to be able to fix most of these problems.

I did previously get the chip re-balled twice in Sydney but it failed after a few months so I don’t think it’s really worth it.

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