Black Screen Of Death Plagues Some Mac Users After Lion Update

By

MacwithBlkscreen

Apple is allegedly investigating complaints from some Mac OS X Lion users about system crashes related to graphics or sleep/wake issues on various Macs. Users that complain about the problem say that a person will see their Mac suddenly crash and display a black screen or a kernel panic. One common situation surrounding the problem is that some sort of graphics event is taking place or that the crash may take place when the computer wakes from sleep.

The majority of people complaining about the problem appear to be using MacBook Pros released in 2010 that contain a GeForce 330M graphics card and an i5 or i7 CPU. The problem is apparently evident on MacBook Pros which have the ability to switch between two graphics cards (either a dedicated GPU or an integrated one to save power). Some iMac users are also reporting problems, but they seem to be in the minority.

One workaround for MacBook Pro users using a machine with two video cards it to select one of the graphics cards. You should refrain from switching back and forth between the two because this is what appears to cause some of the crashes being reported. Another workaround for the wake errors is to turn off system and display sleep on the MacBook Pro or iMac.

It isn’t clear when Apple will release a fix for these problems, but hopefully they will act quickly since Apple’s discussion forum is rather lively about the topic with a thread approaching 36 pages long.

Note: the picture accompanying this post is of a MacBook Air simulating what a BSOD might look like on a Mac.

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