Systems crashes randomly, beeps three times
Hi everyone,
I have a mid-2010 17" MacBook Pro with a great track record since the day I bought it. I did have to upgrade the RAM from 2 x 2gb original sticks to 2 x 4gb ones three years ago because I was running some heavier software, but it held up great since then.
A couple weeks ago, though, it froze and crashed while I was watching a video (could only shut it down with power button) and it's been downhill ever since ; I was inconsistently able to restart the computer (sometimes the fan would start, but nothing after that, sometimes it would let me login, but then restart on its own again and again untill I would shut it down myself), sometimes it would beep three times, some only once. It even beeped morse code for S.O.S. Most of the time I'll have to try and restart it 3-4 times after it crashes before it runs normally again.
It has kept crashing ever since, after variable usage time on CPU demanding tasks (graphics intensive video games) as well as normal tasks (mostly TextEdit stuff)
I've been at the Apple store and they figured it had something to do with the RAM. They suggested I take it out and put it back again, which I did, but it only seemed to make the problem slightly worse.
I've read a bit about this on the forums here but I couldn't seem to find a straightforward solution, and I have to admit I don't quite know in which direction to go from here.
Can anyone help?
Is this a good question?