When I saw the title of this post, I initially thought that it was a completely different kind of "fuzzyness", similar to the kind of problem I recently had. It turns out that my problem was slightly different but, as I managed to fix it, I'm going to post my method of solution anyway - just in case anyone else has a similar problem. After all, it's always best to repair these things yourself (for free) instead of buying a new machine, isn't it?
A couple of weeks ago the display of my 1GHz 15" Titanium PowerBook started to go fuzzy (kind of like a poorly-tuned analogue TV). I saw glitches all over the place whenever I moved the mouse, and even with the mouse stationary the display remained garbled. The following images show the kind of problem I'm talking about
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At first, I thought that the display itself was damaged/broken. I tried restarting, but the problem remained. I put the TiBook to sleep and went to bed. The following morning, I woke the PowerBook from sleep and the display was fine! After about an hour, however, the display became garbled again. I persevered for another couple of days, and the problem was very intermittent. Whenever the screen screwed up, I put the machine to sleep for a few minutes and then woke it up again (not ideal!). However, I eventually lost patience...
So I launched a VNC session and went upstairs to view my laptop from my iMac. Remarkably, the fuzzy, messed-up screen was also showing up in the VNC session (see the above screenshots)!! This implied that that there was NOTHING wrong with my PowerBook's display. You see, I believe VNC takes what's being fed to the host display and forwards it across the network to the client. Since the graphics were showing up fuzzy on the VNC client, that meant that my PowerBook display was showing the messed-up graphics because it was being SENT messed-up graphics from my graphics card.
So I had established that the screwy graphics were probably due to the PowerBook's graphics card. But what was causing it? Well, the display tends to go wonky when I'm watching flash videos (i.e. when the graphics card is under heavy load), indicating that it may be a heat-related problem. Presumably, this could be due to either a failing graphics card (either the card itself, or the fan that's supposed to keep it cool) or the excessive dust/fluff that's accumulated inside my PowerBook over the years.
Assuming that it was a heat issue, I remembered a neat little free utility that I'd tinkered with in the past. It's called ATIcellerator II, and it's available on MacUpdate:
ATIcellerator II
What it does is allow you to control the clock frequency of your ATI graphics card. Most people (myself included, back in the good old days) use it to overclock their graphics card (to make things run smoother), though this can lead to overheating. However, you can also use it to underclock your graphics card. I didn't know why anyone would ever want to do this... but now I do! As the name suggests, it's only compatible with ATI cards - as luck would have it, my PowerBook uses an ATI card!
So I installed the utility and gradually reduced the frequency of my ATI card. Once I hit -3.37%, the display went back to normal!!
The good news is that it only required a slight adjustment in order to fix the problem completely - so I won't notice any difference in my day-to-day usage. The main G4 processor is running at exactly the same speed as before (1GHz), but the graphics card is now running at 193.50 MHz instead of the default 200.25 MHz. This is fine, since I don't play any 3D games on my PowerBook. I could have probably gone as low as 150 MHz before I started to see any real performance hit - and even then, it would only be a problem for things like the iPlayer and YouTube (both of which would be compensated by the main CPU anyway - so they'd still work properly, but my system would use a little more CPU juice).
I hope this can be of use to someone!
-Matt
Shouldn't the Genius have caught that?
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