Hoping someone else might have an idea about what's causing this problem:
I have an Aluminum PowerBook G4, 1.25Ghz (late 2003) that's been working great since I bought it (minor problems excepted). Within the last few days, I started getting weird garbling on the screen in bizarre patterns. At first anything on the screen will turn very pixelated and weird color patterns appear. Over the next couple of minutes, the screen will get progressively more and more garbled until sections of it look like a checkerboard, and other sections have even more bizarre color patterns, rendering it totally impossible to see anything.
Closing the PB to sleep it and waking it up can help, but only for a minute or two and then the problem repeats itself. I've tried hooking it up to an external display through DVI out (mirrored mode) and when the PB display is garbled, so is the mirrored external display. Restarting has fixed the problem a couple times, but as soon as I put the computer to sleep and wake it back up again, the screen re-garbles. Once so far I've had the screen garbled from wakeup. Apple Hardware Test showed no problems, but for some reason, running Disk Utility and AppleJack seemed to fix the problems when I restarted the computer.
Basically, I'm wondering if this is a hardware or a software problem, and if there's something I can do to fix it if it's software, since I've heard that if it's the video card or mobo, say forget it and get a new Mac. Any ideas?
tl;dr: display gets weird colors and patterns that get worse over time. is this hardware/software and how to fix?
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