Hello,
Something went south with my iBook 500MHz dual USB currently running 10.2.5 about eight weeks ago. I was using it in the library, went and got lunch and when I opened my supposedly sleeping iBook, the HDD would spin up, the pulsing light would switch off and the screen wouldn't turn on. I backed it up over ssh (Darwin helping out in a big way once again!) and sent it off to the AppleCare people. They gave me a new logic board and combo drive (one that doesn't properly fit the case and that I have to manually coax open, but that's a problem I understand!).
About a week after I got my baby back, I was sometimes shocked upon opening it up from sleep to find the screen "solarized." It's some sort of color rendering defect that seems to affect darker colors more accutely, especially anything with blue in it. The MacNN logo on this forum, for instance, is hot pink with a gold border and white lettering. Yet the switch isn't perfect: around edges of other colors, I can catch glimpses of the proper blue colors, etc. I found that this problem would disappear on its own after ten minutes. I could encourage a more expedient fix by increasing the switching frequency of my desktop pattern.
Since it would iron itself out after a redraw accompanying something like a change of desktop pattern, I assumed it was a software problem and set out to delete the appropriate plists.
However, a couple of days ago, my screen solarized on wakeup and has stayed that way ever since. I have switched users, restarted, changed any available settings (my Display pref pane hasn't opened in some time...I have a thread going in the OS X forum to that effect).
It went away after I shut my iBook down for about an hour. My machine booted with a normal gray Apple screen. Once the blue Aqua boot screen came on, the solarizing came back with it. This suggests again a software problem.
Last night, I connected a VGA monitor to my iBook. The iBook showed a solarized picture, the CRT showed the correct picture. This suggests a hardware problem.
I'm pretty sure my iBook will need to visit with the AppleCare techs again, but it has to wait for a few weeks while I get through the end of semester crunch.
What could possibly be going on here?
Something I just read in a current iBook thread here leads me to believe that my display cable running through the iBook's hinge is being crimped or is poorly connected, hence the presence of the problem being pretty well correlated with the opening and awakening process.
What do you make of this?
Thanks,
Peter
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