I received an in person customer recently whom brought me an Apple Macbook Professional circa 2011. This laptop computer had the Apple Macintosh shuts down randomly problem. Whenever, I receive a computer that randomly shuts down, I normally strip it down as much as possible.
What I mean by this is that I remove all external devices. For example universal serial bus flash drives, universal serial bus dongles, keyboard, mice, etcetera. I will also release any possible electric static discharge.
You will want to power off that computer. Then you can disconnect that power cable from both the wall outlet and computer. Now you will need to press the power button for at least thirty seconds.
On laptop computers I remove the battery and set it aside. Then I remove the cover. This Apple Macintosh computer requires multiple covers that you have to remove.
Also, you will need to remove four screws on each side. Two screws are removed from the rear. You will need to remove four screws on the bottom.
Also, you will have to remove the battery. A smaller cover protects the random access memory. This Apple Macbook Professional circa 2011 had a failing digital video disc optical drive.
There are four screws to remove to remove the digital video disc optical drive. However, I could not loosen these screws so I decided to leave the digital video disc optical drive installed. I would rather not strip screws and create even further problems.
I disconnected the hard drive serial advanced technology attachment cable. You must take the hard drive out in order to disconnect this cable. There are four screws that must be removed in order to lift out this hard drive.
Finally, I tested the two dynamic inline memory modules installed. They were both dynamic data rate version two 5300 random access memory modules. I cleaned them with a dry eraser.
I tested each individual random access memory module in each slot. There were two memory slots present. One of these memory modules would sometimes cause this Apple Macbook Professional to not boot.
The other random access memory module did not cause this problem. With the process of elimination, I deduced that it was a faulty dynamic inline memory module. I installed a two gigabyte dynamic data rate version two 6400 random access memory module.
The original memory modules were both one gigabytes in size each. I have left this Apple Macbook Professional circa 2011 model powered on for over two days now and it has not powered off once. Another interesting change I noticed was that now the battery charges.
This customer had told me that this battery no longer held a charge. When it comes to troubleshooting Apple Macintosh shuts down randomly problems, there is a large list of possible culprits. Power supply, motherboard, random access memory, operating system, etcetera all could be possible culprits.
I normally start off with hardware troubleshooting, because often times this is the culprit. A faulty or failing random access memory module is not that rare. Also, even a faulty or failing random access memory module slot can occur.