Has Leopard Killed our Mac[S] ??

[TheReef]

Ever since upgrading to Leopard (about one month ago), our G4 Sawtooth developed a graphics problem where lots of green pixels would appear on screen.

I replaced the graphics card with the stock 128 rage, and things were back to normal, but the much better Radeon 9000 was now dead.

Now, today our PowerBook G4 12" 1.5 Ghz has totally gone. After launching Colin Mcrae Rally Mac for the first time, weird pixels appeard on screen and the computer froze.

Booting into Leopard will give a garbled screen when logging in, and will sometimes freeze. In the Apple hardware diagnostic test it says the video ram is damaged. Also in the diagnostic test, the screen is still partly speckled with black, red and green dots, but is readable. There is little point in fixing it now, as Apple charges ridiculous amounts for spare parts.

Is Leopard (or software such as Colin Mcrae Rally) capable of destroying hardware due to software bugs or is it just my bad luck?


Our older Macs were so reliable ( PM 7600, Performa 580, iMac G3, PB G3 Pismo), I'm a bit hesitant to 'upgrade' to a used G5 now, my confidence in Mac reliability is not what it use to be

 

[ivnj]

Try installing Tiger and see.

 

[yippy]

It is almost impossible for software to destroy hardware (I am not counting firmware here). That sounds like just bad luck.

 

[JML42691]

I am going to have to second "yippy" and say that it was most likely bad luck.

 

[SrWebDeveloper]

I'm going to add a very, very remote possibility that nothing was "broken" by installing Leopard. It could be as simple as the color profile needs to be re-calibrated, or a certain graphics mode (based on monitor selection or something else) is causing the issue (switch between lower and higher to confirm). I would have tried that before swapping cards, only takes 5 mins. to do both, then I'd be satisified it's hardware related -- meaning yep, bad luck city.

I know some of you are shaking heads.... I admit this is stretching it.

-jim

 

[TheReef]

We tried a reformat with Panther, with the same issues.
After researching on Apple discussions I found the problem has occurred on other machines.

We'll be waiting for a new Mac mini, hopefully one is released soon.

Thanks all for your help.

 

[SrWebDeveloper]

Please document "other discussions" as alot of folks around here still believe software alone cannot blow up a peripheral device like this. I'd be interested to know the exact cause and resolution for this one, it's interesting.

 

[jellomizer]

It is almost impossible for software to destroy hardware (I am not counting firmware here). That sounds like just bad luck.

Not quite true... But it is usually a combination of Software causing the hardware to break itself...

I once messed up my video card (on a PC) back in the late 90's, to a point where it never worked well again, and having reinstalled the OS. What happened I was writting some Parallel Processing code (my system had 2 CPU's which was a luxery back then, and very rare) And the System at the same time sent multible singnals to the video card at once multiplying the charge sent to the hardware causing failure. It was the combination of the fact of flaws in the hardware (probably a bug in the parallel processing bus with its comunication with the hardware, the OS Linux 2.0.something) Caused a failure.

While most application are written single threadidly and don't push the OS at worse you data will get delted but all the hardware will work. But it is possible espectially with systems such as Leopard which is designed to handle multible processors, and the fact that modern GPU's are so powerful and have many parallel processing advantages combined with OS X integration of the GPU and CPU... I could say a problem can occure with tiger. Most likely due to 3rd party fixes to the hardware, which apple hasn't fully tested.