October 24, 2013

NVidia keeps crashing my system.

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 ;)

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