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

[Namechanger2015]

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?

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.

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

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

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..