Avoid Kernel Panics upon waking MacBook

Jan 22, '09 07:30:01AM

Contributed by: bradford653

I have a 13" MacBook that I love more than my dog. So far I've had absolutely no problems with it, save for one.

When I'm at home, I operate it with its lid closed and connected to an external Dell monitor. This situation works great until I have to take my laptop into the office. I've found that if I put the laptop to sleep with the external monitor connected, and then wake the laptop later without the external monitor, I receive a friendly Kernel Panic a few seconds after opening the lid.

The solution to avoiding this situation, for me at least, is to open the lid before putting the laptop to sleep, disconnect the monitor, wait for the laptop to recognize that it needs to switch to the internal display, then shut the lid and head off to wherever it is that I'm going.

This kludge helps out a lot in avoiding the problem of spending 10 minutes telling someone how awesome Mac OS X is compared to (insert your operating system here), only to open the lid and watch in horror as your computer crashes.

[robg adds: I don't have a MacBook here to test this with, but my MacBook Pro doesn't exhibit the same problem.]

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