Help Please (with strange behaviour on my desktop)

[jamesc7770]

Hi

Can anyone help?

I have some very strange behaviour on my desktop at the moment and I really don't have any idea why they have appeared but if you can see in the attached picture there are odd matrix like marks surrounding every icon including the Finder menu, the Dock icons and mouse cursor. I noticed them after waking the mac from Sleep mode. I have tried restarting and relaunching the finder but no change.

any ideas??

cheers james

 

[Makosuke]

Have you tried just restarting? Could be a one-time random glitch.

If restarting doesn't fix it, there are other things to try, although it's at least possible it's a hardware problem with your video chip/VRAM. I say that because I had the video card in my G5 go bad, and it looked unnervingly like that. (And yes, it turns out that a hardware problem CAN show up in screenshots--I was surprised by that. I believe the screenshot system pulls the image straight out of the video buffer.)

 

[jamesc7770]

thanks for you reply Makosuke, I have tried just restarting it as i thought it was a one time glitch but no luck. I meant to add that it's a Imac G5 2005 model, pre isight! so if it's a video card problem i guess that is replaceable?? and it only happens on some apps. No problems with Safari but ical and photoshop are both effected as is iphoto which i now can't use as the problem is so bad !!

cheers james

 

[Makosuke]

Well, you'd better hope it's not hardware, since that model doesn't have an individually replaceable graphics card--you'd need a whole new motherboard, which probably isn't worth the cost. When I said G5 I meant G5 tower.

That it only shows up in some apps gives you some hope that it's just software, although it could also be related to how those particular apps draw their windows (when mine went out, only things that accessed the 3D hardware looked funny, so only parts of the OS that use hardware acceleration had glitches--and a LOT of stuff uses hardware acceleration now).

You might try running the hardware test disc that came with the computer and see if it A) Shows the same problem (in which case definitely hardware) or B) Gives any errors when it runs tests.

You could also try creating a new user account and see if the issues show when logged in as that user.