Messed up display after waking from sleep?

[Deville]

Hi,

I have a dual 1ghz Quicksilver running Leopard 10.5

I recently did a few upgrades, new video card and sata hard drives.

Everything ran fine for a month and still does, but for some reason, sometimes after it awakes from sleep the display looks like this,




If I do a restart, the problem remains. But, if I do a complete shut down, then restart it goes away. I have not done a whole lot of trouble shooting on this because it happens so little. I think it's happened maybe 3 times in the last month. Or about 1 in every 30 times it wakes from sleep (Approx)

Any suggestions on what to check, or what it could be would really be appreciated. I'm not to worried about it now, but in my experience these things usually get worse over time, so I should probably figure out the cause sooner then later.

Thanks.

 

[Makosuke]

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.

 

[Deville]

Ok, I'll try it next time and post the results here. Thanks.

 

[Deville]

Ok, it just happened again. I took a screen shot, and restarted. The problem was still there. I then shut down and restarted and it went away. The screen shot does show the messed up display. Any thoughts?

 

[chrismacguy]

Ok, it just happened again. I took a screen shot, and restarted. The problem was still there. I then shut down and restarted and it went away. The screen shot does show the messed up display. Any thoughts?

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

 

[Nameci]

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.

 

[Makosuke]

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.

 

[Deville]

It's got a Radeon 9800 in it now and I don't have another one to test. My only other card available is a ATI rage 128 pro which I just refuse to put in this thing again because it sucks so bad.

I guess I'll just leave it till it dies, and either get a new computer or new vid card then.

The only thing I can think of that might be causing a software issue is a few months ago it would not sleep on it's own at all. It only slept if I did it manually. I tried to fix it but couldn't, I did everything I could think of and find online to try and fix it but no luck.

I gave up and installed NMS Sleep Assist to resolve the issue which worked like a charm, but seems to have possibly brought this new problem with it.

Hard to say though because it was a few weeks after I installed NMS I noticed this display problem.

 

[chrismacguy]

It's got a Radeon 9800 in it now and I don't have another one to test. My only other card available is a ATI rage 128 pro which I just refuse to put in this thing again because it sucks so bad.

I guess I'll just leave it till it dies, and either get a new computer or new vid card then.

The only thing I can think of that might be causing a software issue is a few months ago it would not sleep on it's own at all. It only slept if I did it manually. I tried to fix it but couldn't, I did everything I could think of and find online to try and fix it but no luck.

I gave up and installed NMS Sleep Assist to resolve the issue which worked like a charm, but seems to have possibly brought this new problem with it.

Hard to say though because it was a few weeks after I installed NMS I noticed this display problem.

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).

 

[Hiyaimcool1]

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.