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Apple's line of laptops for professional and power users. To date, the MacBook Pro line includes 13, 14, 15, 16, and 17-inch variants, with major revisions defined by Pre-unibody(Original), unibody, Retina display, Touch Bar, and SOC (system-on-a-chip) designs.

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mbp turnson, glitchy, then it restarts itself

Its a MacBook pro 15" and two day ago it just shut itself down, I thought it was a random bug or something so I ignored it because it turned right back on and was fine but then yesterday it got worse, the whole screen would glitch and become a rainbow of bad colors then it shuts down, I thought maybe I had some out of date porgam mucking me up so I allowed all the updates that had been hounding me, but that made thongs worse! now its to the point that I can't turn it on properly, like I said it will power up, but its all glitchy, like there are big vertical Lines blocking parts of the screen, it lets me enter my password but then it loads for a few minutes and restarts.

What do I do? Could it be a virus or over heating or what?

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Can you give us the last four digits of your serial number so we can figure out which model you have.

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Help us help you. The more complete the description of your problem is (what MBP you're using - there are 25 versions possible from your Machine ID, what OS you're using -there's a lot of those too) the more assistance we can provide, and, the sooner we can provide it..

With such a generic descriptor as a starting point here's some generic video troubleshooting to start with.

Connect to an external monitor. If you see the same display behavior it's the GPU/VGC. If you don't it's part of the internal display chain.

Try running Apple Hardware test or Diagnostic (depends on your MBP and your OS which you'll use).

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I know its 15 inch but beyond that I really don't know what kind it is, I got it second hand and I am not at all computer savvy, I'm actually lucky I was able to find this site.

I also don't know what operating system it has, I think its snow leopard but I really can't say for sure. How can I figure these things out without being able to turn it on properly? I looked at the underside and almost all of the writing is warn away, I think itmight say model # a1260? Does that help?

I also don't know if I can connect to a monitor, ill have to see if I can borrow one tomorrow.

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Actually, A1260 does help. If you read it correctly, it's an Early 2008 15" MacBook Pro, which came with a 2.4/2.5/2.6 GHz C2D processor. It's able to run any operating system from late versions of 10.5/Leopard onward.

As mh3 says, in the event of hardware oddities, running AHT (Apple Hardware Test) is a useful way to assess the situation. The test utility is located on one of the two grey disks that originally came with the computer; the other disk contains the installer for the original 10.5 operating system. Do you have those disks?

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I checked and when I bought the mbp it only came with the installer.

Another question tho, last night I was actually able to get logged in (very rare and doesn't last long before glitching) so I tried to get some stuff off the computer quick, pictures and videos ect, I was using dropbox when the mbp shut itself down again butiI don't know if it was finished, do you think those pictures are still okay?

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Talked it over with some people at work at they said it sounds like a virus and that I should reset the BIOS, can I do that on a mac and how do I go about doing that?

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Mac's don't run a BIOS they run an EFI. To access data you can remove the HD and put it in an external case... providing it's not damaged. Continual booting and crashing can mung up the MBD so that the drive is not readable or repairable so putting it in an external case is a good move at this point.

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