Chosen Solution
Hi I was just referred to this website and hopefully someone can help with this. I have a MacBook Pro 15" Unibody Mid 2010 which I bought in June/July of 2011 off the Irish mac refurbished site. In about June 2016 I had an issue with a replacement battery which I bought from a computer shop in Dublin, it wasn’t holding a charge very long. The guy working there suggested that it may be because I had a lot of movie files on the laptop and it could also be the old style hard drive. He also pointed out that the computer was slow and the SSD would solve this. A few months later I went back to the same store and got them to install a SSD (Kingston 240GB). No more than a few days or a week later I found that my laptop was shutting down randomly. I brought it back and he checked that the fans were clear and that was it. He didn’t know what else it could be. I only had the problem since they worked on it and never before that. More recently in the last few months when I turn on the computer it takes a while before I can even open program, they just keep bouncing. It says something like ‘program not responding. What I always have to do is force quit and try and open them a number of times before they actually do open. It still shuts down randomly as well as this ’ program not responding’ issue. But it also cant seem to handle too much activity. For example I wouldn’t dare try and run a program like illustrator or photoshop because it seems to make it shut down immediately and often even opening a file in preview using the space bar can cause the machine to shut down. I have very little files stored on the computer and I have no heavy programs installed. The majority of my use of the mac now is browsing the internet and playing movies and I still experience these problems. It sounds to me like its a hard drive issue but thats only a feeling I have, I have no real technical know how. Because it is now classed as a ‘vintage machine’ apple or there licenced stores won’t touch it and also because it has had a replacement hard drive and battery. any help with this would be greatly appreciated
To alleviate you worries about a stolen board, check the serial number under “about this Mac and compare to the number on the back.
1st issue: The battery you bought is likely bad, although it also depends on how quickly it was running out and which programs are being used. 2nd issue: 15” 2010 models have a common issue with crashing/kernel panicking, which is caused by C9560 on the logic board. This capacitor fails on 2010 models, which causes the GPU supply voltage to sometimes fall below the threshold required, causing it to reboot. This is more likely to happen when launching more intensive programs such as Photoshop, like you described. A new polymer capacitor would have to be soldered on to the logic board to resolve this issue. 3rd issue: The SSD is likely the cause of the other problem, where programs are taking a while to launch. You can try a fresh format and OS reinstall, or try booting into a test drive. If it is fine booting into a test drive, it is a problem with the SSD.
There are a couple of causes for the symptoms you have here. You need to see if you can isolate the problem down a bit. How about running the built-in diagnostics to see if something pops there. Here’s how: How to use Apple Diagnostics on your Mac. Let us know what it tells you.
