On the official Apple website, it says,

Includes extensive graphics enhancements.

Max just informed me that there was a page located here that said this firmware update would fix the overheating issues with my Santa Rosa MacBook Pro. How a software update can fix a hardware glitch is beyond me, but did you notice that the page no longer exists? Does this mean that they decided it wasn’t actually a fix?

This is what happened to my laptop. It would do this more often when I had the external display hooked up and when I was running lots of programs (the laptop was hot). Usually I was using A/C power. This would be resolved after a forced reboot, but would keep happening until one day the display just wouldn’t turn on.

I bought my Macbook Pro (a refurb because I was broke) in September of last year. My original warranty had nearly worn out when I started having problems with my graphics card, the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT. First the screen started to go funny blocks of colour. Then I occasionally had trouble getting the display working from sleep.

Then one day it stopped working. Bummer. But these things happen, right?

My colleague, Max, pointed me towards online forums where other MacBook Pro users were having the exact same problems. We* were able to diagnose the problem fairly easily, and I took it to the Apple shop.

The problem is with the graphics card being crappy and overheating. We were able to connect remotely and discover that my beloved laptop wasn’t recognizing the graphics card for what it was, but as an integrated Intel chip.

Because the graphics card is soldered to the logic board, the whole dang thing needs replacing which is essentially a new laptop, right?

Wrong. Two weeks later the exact same thing started happening again, which we half-expected based on customer complaints in the forums.

So now my laptop is in getting fixed again and I am trying to work on a Dell, which would be alright if I didn’t keep trying to use Apple shortcuts and having random things happen…

* by ‘we’ I mean Max. I just stood around.