Greg’s Macbook

My friend Greg is having the same problems with his MacBook that I was. I attempted to post a long comment on his Blog providing him with more info on the problem, but then decided to just post it here for everyone to read.

It’s a logic board problem. I spent a month troubleshooting why my MacBook would shut down randomly, and it truly is a random problem. I could never reproduce it “on command.” The closest I came to reproducing it regularly was to run “yes < /dev/null" in a terminal and max the processors out. It tended to make the shutdown occur. On the Apple discussion boards it's now known as the "RSD" problem. If you take it in to the Apple store, they'll fix it on-site and if they have the logic board in stock, you should be able to get it back in a couple of days. One of the theories as to why it takes so long for the MacBook to start showing this problem is that the first run of MacBooks just run too hot, overly stressing the logic board's components. By the time Apple released the MacBook firmware update (which makes the MacBook run a lot cooler) it was too late. (Granted, this is just a theory- but since Apple has given no official word on the cause of the RSD it's as good as any other explanation.) Make sure that once you get your logic board replaced that you upgrade it's firmware first thing, just to be safe.