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Camali · Mar 2, 2009, 03:10 PM

So this morning my machine booted up as normal, but when I looked at the screen, there were all these strange screen artifacts. The mouse displayed 2 lines of vertical lines! The menu bar has dots all across from left to right, all windows display their shadow with vertical iines the full height of the window!. However, everything displays fine in all my CS4 apps, Safari, Font Explorer, it appears to only be with OS related displays, even pathfinder looks screwed up, but not the fINDER!

I reset the PRAM numerous times, checked that the video card was seated correctly, ran Cocktail (it stopped, never finished) even checking the drive stopped, system behaved normally minus the screen issue. However every now and then I notice the system slow down to halt (spinning beach ball) so I restarted the machine into single boot mode (?) and it displayed "SYSTEM WAS MODIFIED" and so I did and fsck -f command, fans kicked in full blast after 2 minutes and nothing happened, restarted in safe mode, but that never came up!

I don't know what else to do aside from reinstalling Leopard, which is going to be a headache as I have WORK TO DO! I'd appreciate any kind of help, as this is the first severe problem I've had with any Mac and I'm not use to this type of aggravation from any Apple product!!!!

Big Mac · Mar 2, 2009, 04:10 PM

It could be a Universal Access feature that got turned on inadvertently, if it's only occurring within the OS. Please provide us with a screen shot (Command-Shift-3) to confirm that.

Camali · 05:39 PM

http://s734.photobucket.com/albums/w...=Picture55.png

as you can see there are artifacts in the dock, desktop icons and System Prefs panels!

reader50 · Mar 2, 2009, 05:38 PM

Boot from the OSX Install disk, see if the artifacts are gone. If they are, then it's a software issue. An Archive Install should fix it.

If the artifacts are still there when booted from the DVD, then there may be a hardware issue. Reboot while holding down the Option key - they hardware test partition should appear.

ps - check to see you are set to 'millions' of colors in your display prefs. I've sometimes had a game reset me to 'thousands', then wondered why things looked so bad.

Big Mac · Mar 2, 2009, 06:38 PM

Looks like a GPU issue, unfortunately. Do what reader50 instructed.

OreoCookie · Mar 3, 2009, 06:20 AM

Or defective RAM of the graphics card might be the root cause.

Barton · Mar 4, 2009, 07:46 PM

Dude! I had the exact same problem! and I regestered just to tell you my experience.

The artifacts are the same I had on my Radeon -stock- 9600 that came with my G5 Dual 2GHz (early 2005). It's a fault with the VRAM that unfortunately requires a full replacement. Lucky for me I was on Apple Care and my local Apple dealer gave a new card right away and I did the installation without taking the machine to the shop, mainly because the procedure is user serviceable: easy.

You'll need another AGP 8x card for the matter in case you are out of warranty coverage. But rest assured that it's a VRAM failure, just don't take my word and run the Hardware Test Program from the original Installation DVD and check for yourself. The problem does not reproduce using the Hardware Test CD as it doesn't use OpenGL (Quartz Extreme operations that require VRAM usage) to draw into the screen like Mac OS X Aqua layer does.

Do it fast as the problem WILL get worse making the screen unreadable.

Good Luck!