17" PowerBook Display Issue

[Zoowatch]

Recently, I've observed that...

1) The 4 corners of the screen are dimmer / darker than the rest of the screen. Is this normal?

2) There's a purplish-white messy image on a black background appearing for a second each time the computer starts up. This is seen just before the "Starting Mac OS X" blue screen appear. I haven't seen this before, but now it appears at every start-up without fail.

3) After the "Starting Mac OS X" blue screen, the desktop will appear. Initially, the display colour would be slightly faded and has a blue-ish tone. About 1 second later, the display switches to the normal display colour (vivid and bright). This also happens at every start-up.

From this (Faded, Blue-ish tone)

To this (normal, vivid colour)

This PowerBook is 2 years and 3 months old and it has been subject to light use only (still under AppleCare). It has NVIDIA GeForce4 MX graphics card with 64MB VRAM. I am certain these issues were not observed before and they happen only recently.

To illustrate what i mean, please look at this Quicktime movie (~10MB size) taken on a normal start-up

Questions: are these issues common among PowerBooks? Or are they showing signs that the computer's display might malfunction in the near future? Will the problems get worse with time? Are there PowerBook users out there who also experience the same problem?

 

[mad jew]

Okay, well I don't know if this'll help but try resetting PRAM/NVRAM and maybe PMU too, just for fun. There's a small chance that some of the graphics/display firmware settings have become wonky although. Hopefully this is the case.

 

[Spectrum]

I can't comment on most of that, but the bluish tinge of the desktop which then changes could just be the delay before the OS applies the correct ColourSync profile.

That splodge doesn't look good. keep an eye on it.

Recently, ...snip!... problem?

 

[desenso]

Send it in. The longer you live with this, the more complacent you will become about the problem, and then all of a sudden your AppleCare will run out.

Or take it to an Apple store....

 

[Zoowatch]

i've tried resetting the Power Management Unit (PMU) by pressing Shift-Control-Option-Power, wait 5 seconds then start the computer...

the problem of purple-white splotch still exists.

i then tried to reset the PRAM and NVRAM by pressing and hold the Command-Option-P-R keys to start up until i hear the second chime.

the problem doesn't go away



You see, what really worries me is that it will get worse with time...
initially it happens only at start-ups which doesn't bother me much.

These days, i get the purple-white splotch (a brighter version of that) right in the middle of working on my computer, about once each day on the average. But it is really hard to take a photo of this as it flashes at a random time. Also because it lasts only a second, i can't take a picture of that using a camera.

I'm just worried that Apple will say "oh, PowerBook display deteriorates a little with time, and this is not covered by AppleCare".

 

[mad jew]

Take it to Apple and tell them you've reset the PRAM, NVRAM and PMU and still no luck. Generally I find that if you use some technical words (appropriately) you get further because it looks like you know what you're talking about. They should be pretty good about replacing or fixing it.