Screen goes crazy when I restart

R

rbrlecic

Registered
My screen has had an ongoing problem since I first updated to MAC 10.3.9 a while back. At the time I learned to live with it and found a long way to get it back to normal and continue on with help from apple support. I have since had my warranty and apple care run out and I really want to just fix this problem and findo ut some solutions and suggestions to get a little more life out of my mirror door G4.

My problem:

My screen will be normal, clear, and have great color, but everytime I have to restart or do an install and restart when the screen comes back on it is well pixelated to hell and has red blue yellow squares in lines litering the screen and distorting the view. This is lessened when I lower my screen rez to 800x600 or below and colors from millions to 256, but it does not go away. I then have to try and set the settings to 800x600 at 256 and restart sometimes quite a few times before the screen starts up again normal.

I used to have two monitors hooked up to my computer an old crt and my apple display. This never caused a problem and this all started when I upgraded way back to 10.3.9. Apple support suggested my video card went bad (ATI Radeon 9000 Pro, VRAM: 32 mb). Now at this point if this is a solution that sounds good I finally want to just upgrade my video card and never have to play the game to get my screen to work again?

Other then this my computer runs perfectly fine. Would filling my RAM to 2GB from the 1GB it is also help, I want to eventually get more ram as well I currently have 1GB?

I am running 10.4.7 and would greatly appreciate any suggestions to upgrade or fix my computers screen problem.

Thanks
 
When you pixels going crazy on the screen, 99% of the time it's the video card that is acting up. There have been times when the drivers are the culprit. Based on the specs you provided for the card, I would rather say just replace the card and get a better card, it will give you a more enjoying experience than the 32MB card. Even a low-end Radeon card or Nvidia card will be better at this point (128MB or higher). Your system memory at 1GB is fine as long as you are not running more than 2 or 3 basic programs.

If you would rather just test out to see if the drivers are the culprit, you could dig into the system and remove the drivers and re-install them.

ATI and Nvidia support will tell you the same thing, that re-installing drivers ontop of existing drivers does not always fix the problem. Removing the drivers is the only sure-shot method.

With that said, it's no simple task to remove video drivers on a mac. In fact most would say just format and re-install.

I wouldn't go that far at this point and would suggest that you pop in your system restore disc and do an archive and install, so that your settings are saved and you get a fresh system folder with fresh video drivers in there.

Test it out from there on wether or not your pixel issue goes away. Upgrade this fresh system folder up to 10.4.7 and see if your issue still is there or not.

OtherWorldComputing has the 9600 Pro and 9800 Pro (both 256MB), but if you are careful, you could easily pick up a decent replacement off of eBay for less.

Hope you find this information helpful and get's you going in the right direction.
 
What kind of mac are you using? If you have an install disk, boot from that. If the video is fine in the installer, then it's likely a system problem.
 
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