[ltitle]

Well that was weird. Fortunately, the problem appears to be gone (for now). But, I was working on my new 17" PB (Mac OS X 10.2.5) last night in iDVD and iPhoto. I put the PB to sleep and took it to work this am. At work, I plugged in my Apple Trinitron 21" ColorSync monitor, power adapter, ethernet and USB for keyboard. Then, I tried to wake up the PB and the screen was dark but not completely off. I could barely make out a lengthy dialog box. I could not get the display to brighten, despite pressing the brightness button and going to displays and trying to "detect displays" etc. So, I reboot the machine and that is when things got hairy. The initial gray screen was funny looking. That is, the dark gray apple was not sharp and the gray had a TV like appearance (like snow). Then, when the desktop came on the picture was all posterized, and all of the pixels were shimmering. Real weird looking. What was really wild was that when you moved a window from the built in display to the 21" monitor, the image became sharp and normal looking on the external monitor. I tried rebooting again and again, without a change. Put in my TechTool disc and the diagnosis was negative. Then, I called Apple. They took me through the usual i.e. reset PRAM VRAM etc, but nothing fixed it. They wanted me to use the system discs to see if the problem went away, but I left them at home (I never anticipated a problem). First guy, thought it was a software problem, while the second guy was sure I had a hardware problem. So, I said I would call back later that day. Funny thing was the computer seemed to be working OK otherwise. I kept on checking my email and tried rebooting a few times throughout the day, but the problem never went away. Then, at the end of the day, as I was packing up the PB, I checked my email for the last time. My colleague noted that my time and date were off, so I changed it back to today from 1970. Anyways, as I was unplugging the external monitor and as the computer was redetecting the monitors, the screen went from that weird appearance to a sharp normal image again. Gee, that was weird.

I haven't had a problem since. What do you think ? What should I do now that I think things are back to normal.

[wanderlust]

Same thing happened to me under different circumstance. I launched an old system 9 game which forced my display colors from millions to 256, which I thought wasn't even supported any more (however, 256 is now an option for me). I was getting your described graininess until I opened my display pref panel and changed colors from 256 back to millions. All was well. Sounds like the displays panel on your system got confused and forced your LCD screen into 256 realm. Hope this sheds some light on your mystery.

[ltitle]

I wish it was that simple. The display was still set at 1440x900 with millions of colors. I did check. Even switching to lower resolutions/number of colors would not reproduce the appearance.