[JamesRedwood]

Hi All,

My display has just recently started to be very fuzzy and move sideways very very minimally - But enough to be noticeable

I took it to Apple who said I would have to pay for a complete estimate but he suspects its the logic board.

Has anyone heard of this think before? The display shakes a tiny bit but its very annoying on the eyes.

I just had a 2GB memory upgrade (about a month ago) so I m really upset!

Any ideas?

[bishopazrael]

First thing... try the old ram.. see if it happens with it in. Apple's going to do that anyways and if it's 3rd party ram theres a high liekely hood that they'll blame the ram. Barring the ram... any reason to doubt the genius? I mean the video IS on the logic board.

[romeosc]

Check Video connector. Whoever upgraded ram may have broken the connector.
Which computer is it? Powerbook, iBook, MacBook, MacBook Pro?

[JamesRedwood]

It was actually Zoom on univrsal access

Try it and see how freaky it is

[romeosc]

Mine is not blurry on a 17" even with zoom on!

[naphtali]

Originally Posted by JamesRedwood 

It was actually Zoom on univrsal access

Try it and see how freaky it is

Shouldn't the Genius have caught that?

[silver]

Hence why Apple Genius is not really Geniuses, glorified lab rats.

Many many people here are more knowledgeable than any of the Geniuses at any Apple store.

Side note it's really good that you where able to fix the problem.

[imitchellg5]

I could actually see myself thinking something was wrong. Zoom on its first setting looks fuzzy and wierd. It would be funny to take it in again with zoom on and see if he would have sent it in for repair or done a more in depth look.

[bishopazrael]

:::::::sigh:::::::::::::::::

About 2 years ago Apple opend their ABQ uptown store here. I applied for a genius because I thought it would be a good move. Before I did I IM'ed a great guy by the name of jcgeekery. Boy was I glad I did that. Waved me off with a red flag. He basically said that any REAL competent tech wouldn't last longer than a few months there because of all the frustration. I can see why.

I've used my genius bar once... to replace a battery. Other times I've been there I listened to the genius behind the bar... wow.. they've lowered their standards. This guy didn't even really troubleshoot a problem he probably could have fixed right there in 5 minutes. Just remember that the genius' are just people, not Angels of the tech repair sent by the Almighty SJ. It does pay off to google your problem first or come into a forum such as this and get some much better help. Glad OP got his problem fixed.

[homgran]

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:



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

[mania]

Matt. You are my hero - I will give this a shot - same exact thing happening to my powerbook g4 for the last few weeks and driving me crazy.

[homgran]

Glad I could be of help! Let me know how you get on,

-Matt