15″ Macbook Pro 2010 (6,2) GPU Video Issues Solution

Without warning, as of a month ago, our sturdy 15″ Macbook Pro 2010 (6,2) has been plagued by random restarts without any particular pattern or logic to it. Making it immensely, nay – almost impossible to replicate on demand.

Despite all attempts to troubleshoot the problem to find the root cause (including swapping our RAM modules and hard drives), nothing seemed to cure it and it appeared for most part that the GPU was failing.

We have since found (for lack of a better word) a ‘cure’.

This is undoubtedly going to sound strange.

Following up from our earlier article “15″ Macbook Pro 2010 Graphics Issues Returns“, we inadvertently ‘found’ what appears to be a permanent solution that has so far solved the issue in its entirety.

Unfortunately, we cannot explain it. The “why?”

At best we can share the, “how”.

At the time the Macbook Pro started acting up it was running OS X Mountain Lion, 10.8.5 with Apple’s latest Security Update.

Believe us, when we tell you we tried everything.

Coming to the end of our rope, we started to prep the unit to be sent in to an Apple Service Centre, bracing for the potential uphill battle to get Apple to address the problem.

Whatever mods that were performed on the unit were reversed; Solid State Drive (SSD), upgraded RAM and additional hard drive (HDD) and caddy removed.

In its place, we installed a fresh version of OS X Yosemite, 10.10.4 on an Apple HDD, replaced the original ‘Apple RAM’ that shipped with the Macbook Pro and retrofitted the optical drive.

During our post retrofit test we noticed that the unit ceased restarting.

Our curiosity got the better of us and we decided to run it for a couple of days and… it remained stable (?).

There was only one thing left to do to confirm our suspicion and rule out hardware as the culprit – we once again retrofitted our SSD, HDD and caddy and upgraded the RAM again.

Then we proceeded to do the unthinkable and upgraded the OS X from Mountain Lion 10.8.5 to Yosemite, 10.10.4.

Conclusion?

We are now (so far) running a stable Macbook Pro.

Although the internet is awash with complaints of Macbook Pro users suffering intermittent Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) failures after upgrading to OS X Yosemite, 10.10.4; we are experiencing the reverse.

Go figure…