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My MacBook Pro (2012ish) keeps getting a black screen - is it on its way out?

4 replies

Namechanger2015 · 15/06/2016 21:24

Hi there,
I use a MacBook Pro, purchased second hand in 2014. The screen keep blacking out, if the lid has been down for any length of time at all - 2 mins or 2 days.

When I start the laptop it goes to black screen and I have to reboot, sometimes for a good 10 or so times before it recovers. Today I used the laptop with the screen slanted downwards slightly (less than 90 degrees, but only slightly - probably around 80 degrees).

The laptop can be fairly slow but I think it could probably be cleaned out (how?) to make it work faster.

I have the money to buy something decent, and I work from home on my laptop full time, so I do need something good and I have the money to buy something that does the job (up to and over £2,000 to get a 27 inch iMac).

I'm just wondering if this is a silly thing to do just because of black screen?

OP posts:

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Tomzski · 17/06/2016 17:44

For some random issue like you are experiencing resetting the SMC can sometimes be a miracle fix: support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201295

Do you run any applications in the background all the time? I had an issue not that long ago where the twitter app could cause my MBP2015 to refuse to wake from sleep randomly.

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widowerbutok · 17/06/2016 18:33

before spending that kind of money I would a) Google the problem, I have always done this as there is a load of stuff on the net that helps. b) Take it to Apple store if you can, they are dam good at sorting out probs.

Best of luck

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Absinthe9 · 17/06/2016 20:06

But back up your content asap because if your hard drive does fail you have lost the lot!

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Namechanger2015 · 20/06/2016 10:47

Thanks for your help. I have reset the SMC regularly as it's the only fix that seems to work, apart from endless reboots.

Great tip about checking if I have faulty apps, thank you.

I think it might be my email box, which I use as I have 5/6 different email addresses for work which I need to access regularly.

I have tried to open up Powerpoint with Mail running in the background - this took 1min 57 sec to open
I just tried to open Powerpoint without Mail - 8 seconds

Word (with mail running) - 4min 40 sec!
Word (without mail) - 11 secs

My safari browser seems to be very slow as well, I'm not sure why this is..