If you suspect a hardware issue, check your computer's random-access memory, or RAM. If you have the problem after booting from the recovery partition or an external boot disk, that suggests the concern is with your computer's hardware. As with Windows, restarting from a Mac's recovery partition may be useful in the troubleshooting process.
If you can identify a particular program that causes trouble, that may help you solve the problem. If the problem keeps occurring, try to keep track of what's happening when the error takes place. Unfortunately, the alert gives you no idea whether the problem is related to hardware or software. Getting the black screen of death on a Mac is sometimes accompanied by a message to restart your computer. A kernel panic occurs when the kernel of the operating system discovers something that requires you to restart your computer. Mac users may find that a kernel panic is at the root of their black screen.
