...I really, desperately need help, and every time I try to make an appointment at the Mac store near me their reservations are full.
For about a year, everything in my lovely MacBook Pro ran fine. Stellar, even. I had many a long gaming session at the Omega on my pretty little Alexandria. But then, somewhere around July (right after the warranty expired, of course), it started freezing whenever I would play games. At first, maybe once a week. By September it was no longer usable. (No, really. Unusable. We're talking "locks up on the game loading screen". If I'm lucky I get 10 minutes of play.)
I have tried about a million things. At first, of course, I thought it might be the games themselves, so I reinstalled everything from scratch. No dice. Maybe there was a video card update I missed - oh, would you look at that, ATI refuses to release their mobile video drivers to the public. All updates must go through Apple. Apple, of course, has no updates.
I then thought, perhaps it is an overheating problem. (I recently had the power cord replaced because it melted from the inside. One of the wires on the inside may have broke, however this is not the cause of the problem, as it happened well after the freezing started happening. Just thought I'd make a note of it.) I have ramped up the fan speed so much that in those rare moments when I can play for a whole 10 or 15 minutes, the core temp never goes above about 135 degrees (for reference, when it was actually running things well the temp was around 170+). Hell, I even ran with the keyboard off and cleaned out every fan I could find.
On a long shot I maxed out my RAM. Also no dice.
So, here's the symptom list:
- Display locks up or blacks out while playing games (seems to be mostly games that involve 3D environments, such as WoW or Second Life, but not other graphic-intensive programs like Photoshop)
- While the display and inputs are locked up, the machine appears to continue running. For example, if I'm logged into Ventrilo, I continue to hear people talk - I just can't respond. I also will not be disconnected from anything online.
- It didn't start happening until over a year after I'd had the machine running fine.
Tried:
-More RAM
-More cooling
-Reinstalling software (but not a full wipe of the machine)
-Support forums. Every time I find a post it's tied to the software people were running, though, and the answer is inevitably "It's not the game, it's Mac. Ask them."
Thoughts?
