Early 2009 MBP Distorted No video on LCD
So.... this seems like the best place to post this
I have a Early 2009 MBP 15.4 2.8 C2D 8gig Ram 512mb Nvidia 9600m GT with shared 9400m 1680x1050 matte LED LCD 750gig Disk osx 10.8.3
I purchased a MBP on Ebay the only problem that was mentioned was a flashing question mark in a folder, and what looked like to be a flaky display cable the screen went on and off with the movement of the hinge and explicitly no liquid damage, I thought I had got lucky as i won it for £300 popped in a new disk and replaced the HD cable, replaced the display cable, it was a matte model so at the same time I upgraded the display to a 1680x1050 LCD and away I went. All has been good for the last 6 months.
In the last week I have been having major display issues with the internal LCD, I could resolve these by putting pressure on the left hand speaker grill above what I now know to be the WLED driver. Initially this seemed to coincide with the cooling of the machine ie after graphically intensive activity which is what lead me to reflow both GPUs as I have seen conflicting reports of whether some 9600m cards had similar problems to the 8600m
The machine works perfectly closed with an external display via Mini DP to VGA adapter, what I'm typing this on now ! Which makes me suspect somthing post GPU, to do with the LCD output stage.
Using gfx control to force both GPUs these problems still happen on both
Symptoms
Distortion on the internal LCD from boot, tearing the screen going black, the back light still functions %95 of the time.
The machine will occasionally hang just after login in OSX and hangs after the windows login screen too.
When it hangs in osx it reports back with an Nvidia Driver error on next login.
All of these happen in both osx and windows.
What I have tried in no particular order
-Reset pram and smc
- removed reseated and swapped RAM
- buzzed out replaced LVDS cable and swapped cable and original display
-selectively reflowed both GPU and GPU/northbridge with hot air
-baked whole Logic board in oven in an attempt to catch a dry joint I hadn't noticed
-replaced heat transfer compound
- carefully inspected logic board and LVDS connector no glaring problems
-checked back light fuse
-swapped mag safe adapters
-booted from usb installer disk
.....none of this has made it better or worse but the issue is still present....
Anyone have any ideas, I'm thinking bad GPU, or broken trace on Logic Board some where, or something to do with the WLED Controler but am open to try anything else to get it working...
Have tried a few more things but its late and can't remember......
Many Thanks for reading all of my waffle