How do I fix a Macbook Pro with freezing issues tied to the touchpad?

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I’ve recently (ie, in the last 72 hours) noticed that I’ve inadvertently made my Macbook freeze up.

Specs:

Macbook Pro 13″

Aluminium unibody

Purchased in 2012 (it’s too young for such problems! :’( )

Never dropped it – some gentle nudges

The screen freezes up when I accidentally pressed down on the hand rest to the left of the touchpad. (And not even that hard: similar to pushing (not tapping) down on the touchpad to click).

What follows is that the screen freezes (at whatever state I’ve been using it) and the Macbook doesn’t seem to respond to any of my frantic button pressing (as a n00b, this is all I know how to do). This happens when I’ve been using the Internet, but I am sure that since this seems to be a hardware problem, it doesn’t matter what program I’m using at the time. Sometimes the screen shows a weird pattern that flashes for a second or so, and then freezes the screen as how I was using the Internet etc… It looks a little like alternating lines of barcode and jazzy colours. EG:


|||||||||||||||||||
 weird colours
 |||||||||||||||||||
 weird colours
 |||||||||||||||||||

I have a feeling that it’s because I’ve pressed down on where the hard drive is (did a brief Google, but still a bit clueless about the new unibody anatomy).

I have resolved the problem by doing a hard reset, and after a hard reset, everything goes back to ‘normal’, or as normal as it has always been. But after doing this 3 times in the past 24 hours, I’m getting quite worried! I would like to know what is wrong and if it can be resolved. I have had a Macbook before (black, 2008, running Leopard OSX), and the hardware has been nothing but faithful.

Any advice on what to do would be useful – I live in Singapore and there are licensed resellers here, not actual Apple shops. My machine does have Applecare. But I am really quite keen to not have to send my machine to Apple as they will likely send me a refurbished unit, and I’d rather know what is wrong and get it repaired rather than getting a different machine (I’m a little sentimental, and I get attached, what can I say? You may critique this if you like).

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