I just took my MacBook Pro through it’s semi-annual service, this piece of hardware has served me extraordinarily well over the past 2 years and never gives me any trouble. That is, until I forgot to clean the vents for the cooling fans. The first time this happened, my MacBook would start fine, and after a couple of minutes, the network connection would start to stutter and then die completely. I scoured the internet for solutions and they varied widely as to what the issue could be. What would cause a machine that has never even given me a kernel panic, suddenly just start losing connectivity without any notification?
I started taking it apart and once I had the keyboard off, noticed that there was quite a bit of dust inside the machine and got a can of compressed air to clean it all off, especially the vents. I checked all the components for physical damage, but everything was in good shape. I put the keyboard backon and put the battery back in and fired it back up without installing all of the screws. The laptop booted fine and kept it’s network connection for over an hour (normally it would fail after 5 or 10 minutes). I then put all of the assembly screws back in their proper position and rebooted again. No more problems!
