mr91mr@yahoo.co
Registered
I have a Powerbook which I bought new a year and a half ago. Within the past month or so my screen has been displaying distorted lines. I'm not exactly sure how to explain it, because it's not something I've come across before. The best way to describe it (I know this is a stretch) is to liken the problem to the screen you sometimes got when starting up an old school Nintendo game. You find Excitebike in the closet and you wipe the dust off, throw it in the NES and fire it up. Sometimes it takes a few tries to get it to work, and, before it does, you'll get a screen that blinks or remains constant but distorted. When distorted you can kind of make out the images but the lines don't square up, so that the text is jagged and morphed. That distortion is what happens on my Powerbook.
My experience has told me that this is a typical sign of hardware issues. However, the screen only becomes distorted when using certain programs. The problem most frequently arises when I use Safari. It doesn't affect iCal at all though. For example, I could have just Safari and iCal open. My Safari window will be distorted and remain distorted wherever I move it on the screen. As soon as I activate my iCal window though, the same places on the screen that were distorted for Safari are now crystal clear. Naturally that led me to believe that Safari was somehow corrupt, but then I realized that it also becomes distorted when I use Mail, Finder, or Cyberduck (but not Dreamweaver or Firefox). I also thought I could best describe the problem by showing people online, so I tried to use Grab to capture an image. I can capture a distorted screen shot and it will only remain distorted temporarily. When I check the photo again it looks completely normal. So, in the end, I'm not sure what the heck is wrong, and if it's hardware or software.
I don't have any of the other screen problems often described (fading, broken pixels, sunrise effects, etc.), and I run verify/repair permissions daily. I don't have devices connected to the computer. It's OS X 10.4.8, 1.67 ghz PowerPC G4, 1gb ram. The graphics card is ATI Mobility Radeon 9700.
Any thoughts, suggestions, or assistance is great appreciated.
My experience has told me that this is a typical sign of hardware issues. However, the screen only becomes distorted when using certain programs. The problem most frequently arises when I use Safari. It doesn't affect iCal at all though. For example, I could have just Safari and iCal open. My Safari window will be distorted and remain distorted wherever I move it on the screen. As soon as I activate my iCal window though, the same places on the screen that were distorted for Safari are now crystal clear. Naturally that led me to believe that Safari was somehow corrupt, but then I realized that it also becomes distorted when I use Mail, Finder, or Cyberduck (but not Dreamweaver or Firefox). I also thought I could best describe the problem by showing people online, so I tried to use Grab to capture an image. I can capture a distorted screen shot and it will only remain distorted temporarily. When I check the photo again it looks completely normal. So, in the end, I'm not sure what the heck is wrong, and if it's hardware or software.
I don't have any of the other screen problems often described (fading, broken pixels, sunrise effects, etc.), and I run verify/repair permissions daily. I don't have devices connected to the computer. It's OS X 10.4.8, 1.67 ghz PowerPC G4, 1gb ram. The graphics card is ATI Mobility Radeon 9700.
Any thoughts, suggestions, or assistance is great appreciated.
