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My friend just got a Mac Book Pro recently, and it stopped working after a short while. This is what happened:

She placed the Mac Pro on a cooler, and after 3 days to a week the machine froze, displaying a pop up window that told her to restart.

After a while after she restarted, and it was working fine. However, when the same situation happened again she decided to let the laptop to go into sleep mode. When she closed the screen, the laptop didn't go to sleep; it literally just froze. I hope you can help me out!

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On a PC, I'd just tell you to remove both the battery and the power cord, to force a complete power cycle. Silly apple non-removable batteries. – Joel Coehoorn Jul 12 '11 at 16:21
They aren't removable now? My, things have changed since I last used an iBook G4 – Simon Sheehan Jul 12 '11 at 16:22
Can you leave it somewhere to air out and equalize in temp? Basically try not using it for a few days while storing it open at normal temperature? – kweerious Jul 12 '11 at 16:32
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2 Answers

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  1. Hold down the power button for up to 30 seconds. With a dash of luck the machine will turn off. I'd then release the power button and then press it again until you hear this terrorifying shirl tone (that'll perform a SMC reset, which can't hurt at this stage)

  2. Leave the machine out somewhere and wait for the battery to drain on its own. Obviously you'll have to leave it unplugged. After that, try the SMC reset from step 1 and check things out.

  3. Remove the battery yourself - in the event that both option 1 and 2 above don't please you, you can go search how to remove the battery. Given it's internal, that'll be a project and really, you'll probably be better off just skipping to option 4.

  4. Take it to the Apple Store - Mainly if step 1 doesn't help, you've probably got some failed hardware. I'd take it in to Apple and see what they're willing to do. I've had warranty work done before and they were fast and very professional.

As a point of interest, do you know the make & model of the cooling pad?

Hope that helps ya..

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When Mac OS X unexpectedly displays a message telling you to restart (usually in multiple languages, with a power-button icon in the background), it means a critical failure known as a kernel panic happened.

After a kernel panic happens (and after you reboot of course) you can go into /Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/ to find the log report of that panic. Update your Question with that text (or link to it on pastebin or a github gist) and we can analyze what went wrong. Often times it turns out you have bad third-party software (or bad drivers for third-party hardware) and you can just remove the bad software or drivers, or update them to later versions with fixes, and not have the panics anymore.

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