Last Friday I bought in my Macbook into a Genius Bar fully expected to be without it for somewhere between 1 and 4 weeks. Before I bought it down I did a full backup to a firewire drive then swapped out my 3rd party Hard Drive and memory with the stock components. The stock HDD has a fresh install of OS X on it because basically I don’t trust people with my data. When I got there they plugged in a 1G iPod Shuffle that they were clearly using as a thumbdrive and said they couldn’t see any evidence of they system randomly shutting down. This is because of the fresh install of OS X. My guess is they have some program that reads the console.log for the correct error code. AT this point I was starting to get frustrated because it seemed like without that log, they wouldn’t repair it. I then told the Genius to give the the laptop and started running “yes > /dev/null” twice while I just messed around online.

Within 3mins it had shutdown. This is kinda a relief for me because now i knew it wasn’t due to memory or my OS X install. He ran his program and started filing the paperwork. He told me it would probably be done today. TODAY?! Couldn’t believe it. He said it would be 2-3 hours and suggested to go see a movie. Unfortunately for me, I live about an hour from the Apple Store and didn’t really know the area too well. So to kill the 3 hours, i decided to run to work and pick up my paycheck, cash it then head back. Exactly 52mins later I for a call on my cell saying everything had been fixed and the system has been running for a good 20mins under stress. At that point I was no where near so I did what i had to do and headed back up later that night to pick it up.

Its been almost a week and I haven’t had any problems with shutdowns yet. I had the most problems when it first woke up from Sleep and it hasn’t had a problem waking up. So it seems I’m fixed for now. I am alittle skeptical as my first shutdown didn’t happen until months after my purchase. At this point only time will tell.

FYI, they only replaced my heatsink and not the logic board. The item number and description is:

885909147205 – Heatsink Kit, with Sponge, 1.0 MM Conn – $14.06