Macbook Pro did weird blue screen instant-restart

Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
I was working normally on my computer today, using mostly Excel and Firefox, when suddenly the whole screen went bright blue for a second. Then my display came back, but all of the programs I had open were closed, and things started opening like I had just restarted my computer (I have a few programs set to automatically open when I start my computer). I was totally confused but went back to work, and then it happened again 10 minutes later. I shut down my computer for a while after that, and it hasn't happened again, but I'm really worried. What could this be a problem with?



I have a very new (purchased in June) MacBook Pro with 2.53 GHz and 4 GB memory, if that matters at all.



Thanks for any advice!
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Comments

  • Reply 1 of 25
    Normally, Apple generic death screens should not be blue, unless you are running Windows on your MB Pro.

    If it's all about Mac OS, it's not too much likely, yet you might just have hit F11 key, which hides (minimizes) all windows, or F12 key, which activates dashboard.



    Also, -- I'm still talking about Mac OS only -- MBPs have huge problems in Leopard drivers of NVIDIA graphic cards. Suddenly, the whole screen becomes speckled, oftenly greenish (blue?). Updates since 10.5.6 seem to have made that happening less frequently, yet, the logs show the problem is still there.
  • Reply 2 of 25
    The entire screen definitely went pure blue, no speckled anything, and no windows visible. I know what it looks like when I use Expose - this was definitely not that, and it was far more than a screen thing since all my programs shut down too. I'm going to call the Apple people, I just wanted to see if anyone had heard of this problem.
  • Reply 3 of 25
    What OSX version are you running?
  • Reply 4 of 25
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Rokcet Scientist View Post


    What OSX version are you running?



    10.6.1, Snow Leopard. I just upgraded.



    The blue death just happened again, the exact same way, and I was also using Excel. I think my Excel must be corrupt or something, or incompatible with Snow Leopard.
  • Reply 5 of 25
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by exsequar View Post


    10.6.1, Snow Leopard. I just upgraded.



    The blue death just happened again, the exact same way, and I was also using Excel. I think my Excel must be corrupt or something, or incompatible with Snow Leopard.



    Indeed. And that fits the pattern.

    If you want to avoid that behavior I would restore Leopard (got Time Machine?) and try SL again when OSX.6.2 is out. That might cure it.
  • Reply 6 of 25
    I've seen this at work with our point-of-sale software, and what's actually happening is that you're computer is logging out of the user account, and immediately logging back in - similar to what intentionally happens when a unibody MacBook Pro switches graphics processors.



    From what I've ben able to gather, it's the result of using outdated or incompatible software. What version of Office are you using?
  • Reply 7 of 25
    I'm using Office 2004. Oddly, Word doesn't make the computer crash. But I just downloaded Office 2008 from my college which hopefully will solve the problem.



    Thanks for explaining exactly what was happening, that makes a lot of sense!
  • Reply 8 of 25
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by exsequar View Post


    I'm using Office 2004.



    Likely the issue right there. Leopard had enough issues with Office 2004, it's likely to be even worse with Snow Leopard.
  • Reply 9 of 25
    I am having the same problem, but on only one of my macbooks. Everytime i launch excel, i get a blue screen and the computer restarts. It did this when I had Leopard and continues now that I have Snow Leopard. But the very strange thing is that excel works just fine on my other macbook. Both macs are the same, bought at the same time, upgraded to snow leopard at the same time from the family pack, and the Office for Mac was the same disk (also from a multi-license pack). We can't figure on what is going on. Any help is appreciated.



    Thanks.

    RT



    Oh, I forgot to put that I use Office 2008
  • Reply 10 of 25
    Is your Office 2008 fully updated?



    I don't this problem so farand have 10.6.1 and Office 2008



    One thing which may or may not work is re-install the latest update for office 2008 this fixed some issues I had under leopard and may work now.
  • Reply 11 of 25
    I had the same thing happen with my MBP -- an earlier model from June '07 and it was caused by Kensington Mouseworks. Once I uninstalled that, the problem disappeared. A user on another site referred to it as a kernel panic. No matter what you call it, it was caused by a software incompatibility. You might check some other sites for imcompatibility charts. Macintouch has a good one.



    BTW, I replaced the kensginton Mouseworks software with Steermouse 4.0 and that works fine.





    Quote:
    Originally Posted by rob_06 View Post


    Is your Office 2008 fully updated?



    I don't this problem so farand have 10.6.1 and Office 2008



    One thing which may or may not work is re-install the latest update for office 2008 this fixed some issues I had under leopard and may work now.



  • Reply 12 of 25
    The blue-screen quick restart is caused by the system logging the user out and immediately back in. A kernel panic would manifest in a dimmed screen with a black box, stating in white text "You must restart your computer, hold down the power button for five seconds" or something along those lines, in about four different languages. In extreme cases, it can also manifest in raw EFI debug text appearing on top of the current screen contents.
  • Reply 13 of 25
    Not the case here. After the blue screen, the login window appears so I wasn't getting logged back in. I looked at crash logs and couldn't see what was causing it but I'm no expert.



    Quote:
    Originally Posted by Karelia View Post


    The blue-screen quick restart is caused by the system logging the user out and immediately back in. A kernel panic would manifest in a dimmed screen with a black box, stating in white text "You must restart your computer, hold down the power button for five seconds" or something along those lines, in about four different languages. In extreme cases, it can also manifest in raw EFI debug text appearing on top of the current screen contents.



  • Reply 14 of 25
    Hi

    My MBP did the same blue screen restart running Final Cut Studio 2 with the latest updates. It has happened before and I asked a friend who has the same model as me and he tells me his did this using Red alert and CS4. Another friend told me the same thing happened to him but on an older model. Does anybody knows how to fix this?



    MBP 5.1 Intel Core Duo 2.4 Ghz Nvidia GeForce 9400M Nvidia GeForce 9400M GT 250Gig HD OSX 10.5.8







    Alex
  • Reply 15 of 25
    winterwinter Posts: 1,238member
    10.5.8 is the latest version for Leopard, right? If you are fully updated, perhaps try upgrading to Snow Leopard or take it in to an Apple store. Do you have Applecare?
  • Reply 16 of 25
    ivan.rnn01ivan.rnn01 Posts: 1,822member
    Umm...

    You know what, I reproduced it under regular Leopard 10.5.8 with just Firefox for Mac OS X. No, no, none of applications, having been running, was unloaded, yet the machine did log me out and then back in via the blue screen.



    Everything including Firefox is perfectly up to date. I never had a single MS application installed on my Macs. It never happened to me for more than a decade.



    Well, our beloved Apple have delivered something special both into X.5.* and into X.6.* And I believe we can beg for a fix until the Second Coming, nothing will happen, I bet.
  • Reply 17 of 25
    sherrmesherrme Posts: 1member
    I just encountered the same problem. The screen went bright blue and I had to relaunch every program.



    I'm running 10.5.8 on an iMac 2.93 Intel Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM. Microsoft Word 2004 was open, but it was running in the background.



    I was working in Photoshop CS when everything crashed. It's the first time I've encountered the problem in the year since I started using this computer.
  • Reply 18 of 25
    I have the same issue going on with my MBP, I got it back in Jan '10 and it's the 15" 320GB HDD, 8GB RAM, 3.06Ghz Processor- I'll be doing simple web browsing and I'll suddenly without warning or prompt, the screen will turn blue (like it does when I turn it on) and I guess reboot as if I just turned on the machine. Any projects or applications that I was working on will have been closed out with the exceptions of the ones that I have set up to turn on when I log onto my computer. I tried talking to an Apple Techie, but it seemed that I new more about computers than he did.. (sad -_-'). I paid serious money for this machine and I want it to work exactly (or as close to exactly) the way it's supposed to? someone please help!!!!
  • Reply 19 of 25
    The issue as described is the WindowServer crashing. And since all of the applications you are likely to think about have mach-port connections to the WindowServer if it crashes they are all doomed. The bright blue background is the default behind the WindowServer. If you really pay attention to the boot process you can see when the WindowServer takes over by this particular shade of blue.



    This being said we are not really any closer to figuring out what caused the WindowServer (a generally very reliable bit of software) to crash. A list of suspects (there are more):



    1) The copy of the OS in memory got corrupted somehow and this was a once-only event.

    2) You have a bad bit of RAM, and the WindowServer, or some bit of information it was using happened to get loaded into it.

    3) Some application gave the WindowServer something so bad that it crashed. This could be a one-off, or repeatable. If it is repeatable Apple would probably love to get this as a bug report (with enough details to reproduce). WindowServer is somewhere they put a lot of time into testing.

    4) Something is going wrong with the graphics card drivers, this is a little like #3 for most purposes.

    5) Something is wrong with your graphics card hardware. The hardware tests disc might be able to diagnose this, but only if it is something that they predicted.

    6) Your on-disk copy of MacOS is corrupted, reinstalling would solve this, or booting to another OS and proving that it does not happen would be the only proof.
  • Reply 20 of 25
    finally found a forum where folks share my problem. I just bought macbook pro 13" 4gb laptop a few weeks ago...now it randomly turns blue and freezes when in use! this is driving me nuts and only seems to happen when i'm using pages in iwork. everything is updated and it's brand new straight from the apple store. when the screen turns blue i wait but nothing happens, so i hold down the power button and when i turn back on, naturally all my unsaved work has been lost.



    i'm thinking of buying the insurance type deal apple's got going on but this seems kinda like a scam. wtf did i just drop over $1k for if the thing doesn't allow me to perform very basic functions?
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