Messed up display after waking from sleep?

Just out of curiosity, the next time it happens try taking a screenshot (command-shift-3) rather than photographing the screen, and see if the corruption shows up in the screenshot. Might help narrow it down.

I will note, though, that even if the corruption DOES show up in the screenshot that doesn't mean it's not hardware--the OSX screenshot mechanism apparently pulls an image right from the VRAM buffer, which I discovered when the bad graphics card on my G5 tower actually showed the VRAM image corruption in screenshots.

 

Sounds like its the VRAM on the graphics card thats faulty (as it shows up in a screenshot)

 

if it came from sleep, is it not that the image came from the system memory rather than VRAM? The VRAM is without power during sleep but the system memory is. Try to reseat your system memory I guess.

 

I missed the reply to this before.

My main suggestion would only work if you still have the old video card laying around--try swapping it back in and see if the problem goes away. While it's pretty certain it's the video card, at least that'd isolate it.

The only way, of course, to be certain that it's actually a bum video card and not some sort of problem endemic to that card and that Mac, or maybe something specific to your computer (bad sleep voltage? software issue?) would be to find an identical card to your new one and replace it.

As for Nameci's comment, I'm assuming that the problem STARTS after sleep, not that it has anything to do with what's specifically on the screen when the computer goes to sleep. That its, that the card starts glitching when it wakes from sleep, due to something that it's not happy about with that process.

 

I would JUST test it with the old card and then swap them right back again, noone is suggesting using that card for full time use (OS 9 its great... OS X not so much). Then you know if you need a new vid card or a new computer entirely. (It would at least rule it out and then you can put the new one back in and we can look at RAM etc).

 

Mine did the same exact thing, but then after about 3 boots, when it was supposed to go to the login screen, my computer restarted itself and fixed itself.