Hi all, so I have one of the Rev A imac G5's, 17" 1.8G5 Superdrive model. I bought it shortly after they were released, and it has been my favorite mac hands down! However, I held off installing 10.3.9 because of reports I was reading, but I finally broke down and installed it last week, and ever since then I have been getting some very weird video problems? I have never seen this happen before on any computer, and I spend a good portion of my life on and around them.
So what happens? Well, the entire screen will suddenly shift, with the old screen image still visible. So you see the pixels like dragged across the screen for probably about 20 pixels, then everything freezes, iTunes, mouse, etc... and it looks like it is about to have a kernel panic, but then it will come back in a few seconds, music continues where it left off, and everything else continues as usual. It was happening only once or twice a day, but just now I brought it up from sleep, and it was leaving video artifacts of whole windows all over, and doing the jumping and dragging thing. So I restarted, and it was happening every 20 seconds or so for 10 times or more. But now it has been running fine for the last 20 minutes again as I have looked into this.
Are there other reports of such things by anyone? Further, does this sound like a software issue, or a hardware issue? Also worth noting, it does not matter what I am doing, or how many programs are open, as all the artifacts earlier was all with just the finder open. So that makes it sounds more like hardware to me, but the fact that I never saw anything like it before installing 10.3.9 makes me very suspicious of the software as well. For it was either a very timely coincidence, or it is software related?
Any one have any thoughts?
Addendum:
OK, upon further research, it seems that others have had this issue on Apple's discussion boards, and it comes down to the motherboard. So I decided to have a look at mine and see if there was anything amiss. Well, I found 2 capacitors that seem to be bulging, no leakage yet, but it appears to be happening just as the others describe. Just to be sure, I took some pics of it, so if any care to comment/look, have at it. I put them on my webserver, so the links are:
http://www.pyeatt.com/mbpic01.jpg, mbpic02.jpg, mbpic03.jpg
Pics 1 and 3 are from the bottom of the imac looking up, with the G5 on the right, and the HD at the top of the pic, pic #2 is looking down at the 2 caps. The bulging caps are the top two closest to the HD in 1 & 3, and then the near ones in #2. So does this look like I should take it in and get it replaced? Thanks for any comments...
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