Approximately two months ago my 42 months old Mac Book Pro started randomly crashing on me. According to the stack trace the GPU driver was at fault.
At first I ignored the problem because it only happened once a day, but slowly the frequency increased to 3+ times a day. Sometimes in quick succession. And it’s hard to work that way.
I consulted the mighty google just to find out that the NVidia GT 330M used in my mid 2010 Mac Book Pro is known to be faulty.
A simple solution I thought would be to force the OS to always use the integrated graphics chip. Then I could keep on using my MBP. Turns out gfxCardStatus enables me to do just that.
It’s kind of a hassle in that upon reboot gfxCardStatus is started too late so I have to quit some apps in order to only use the integrated GPU again - but at least it’s working - when it’s working! Yay!
Soo… if you are still enjoying an old Mac Book Pro like I am, and your dedicated GPU is dying: give gfxCardStatus a try. Or find a better solution which works properly after restarts ;)