I don't know if people are aware of this, but the Fn-F1 keystroke (what you'd use on a laptop to turn the screen brightness down) in Windows often causes a nasty hard reset of the machine.
It's happened over a dozen times between the two Core Duo MBPs we have. Generally I keep the brightness maxed and try to remember never to hit that keystroke, but every now and then I forget and... wallop.
Today, I did it again. Tried to turn down the brightness (to see if it would get rid of the flicker), screen went black and when it came back the Mac was already at the progress bar booting in OSX. I needed to work in Windows, so restarted normally, holding down option..
..and this happened. (jpg image, sorry about the quality).
The colour palette was completely messed up, even at this early stage of bootup. Windows booted up fine, but all the colours were off. Started using it for about 10 seconds, then boom, a page fault appeared (didn't stay long enough to read the text) and the machine shut down. Tried several times and the same result.
Tried booting into OSX, and now the colour palette is distorted here too, even during the initial Apple & spinning progress indicator screen on bootup. More worryingly, there's a very noticeable flicker/shake on the screen, most noticeable at the top and about 1/3 of the way from the bottom. Otherwise, OSX seemed completely usable.
Here's a shot of OSX, FYI that red & blue blurry mess used to be a very green & blue shot of the Iguazu falls..
So it looked like the graphics circuity might be fried. I rebooted again, went to lunch, came back and.. everything's peachy. The colours are normal, Windows did display the 'encountered a serious error' dialog, but otherwise seems fine.
Has anyone else experienced problems like this with the Fn-F1 key combo? (I wouldn't recommend trying it 'just to see'!)
It's happened over a dozen times between the two Core Duo MBPs we have. Generally I keep the brightness maxed and try to remember never to hit that keystroke, but every now and then I forget and... wallop.
Today, I did it again. Tried to turn down the brightness (to see if it would get rid of the flicker), screen went black and when it came back the Mac was already at the progress bar booting in OSX. I needed to work in Windows, so restarted normally, holding down option..
..and this happened. (jpg image, sorry about the quality).
The colour palette was completely messed up, even at this early stage of bootup. Windows booted up fine, but all the colours were off. Started using it for about 10 seconds, then boom, a page fault appeared (didn't stay long enough to read the text) and the machine shut down. Tried several times and the same result.
Tried booting into OSX, and now the colour palette is distorted here too, even during the initial Apple & spinning progress indicator screen on bootup. More worryingly, there's a very noticeable flicker/shake on the screen, most noticeable at the top and about 1/3 of the way from the bottom. Otherwise, OSX seemed completely usable.
Here's a shot of OSX, FYI that red & blue blurry mess used to be a very green & blue shot of the Iguazu falls..
So it looked like the graphics circuity might be fried. I rebooted again, went to lunch, came back and.. everything's peachy. The colours are normal, Windows did display the 'encountered a serious error' dialog, but otherwise seems fine.
Has anyone else experienced problems like this with the Fn-F1 key combo? (I wouldn't recommend trying it 'just to see'!)
