Hi all, just thought this story could be valuable to somebody else.
One of my close relative was having the following problem with his mac mini autumn 2008 version: the display turned yellow on an intermittent basis. Sometimes a few days without problem and then boom it occurred, other times it was only after a few hours of use. He then went and bought a new Dell LCD monitor thinking his old one was defective. Horror soon followed when he saw the problem reappearing on his brand new monitor. He made a visit to Apple store and the "Geniuses" were clueless. After performing a few diagnostics and not finding anything they told him that replacing the graphic card only was not possible (on-board Intel GMA) and that repair parts (the entire motherboard) would cost over $500 not even counting the labor.
I took the mini home and connected it to my Viewsonic LCD. I was never able to reproduce the problem either even after 3 days of tests and web browsing use. After a quick investigation I realized he was connecting his mini to his monitor using a VGA cable and the VGA-to-DVI adapter. I then returned the mini to him and suggested to switch for a proper DVI cable and since then the problem never reappeared. I concluded the problem was either the adapter or the analog-to-digital video converter in the mac mini GPU. Any comment from a computer technician here ?
cheers
ah, also before you flame me, mac mini is still a great machine 🙂
/Sam
One of my close relative was having the following problem with his mac mini autumn 2008 version: the display turned yellow on an intermittent basis. Sometimes a few days without problem and then boom it occurred, other times it was only after a few hours of use. He then went and bought a new Dell LCD monitor thinking his old one was defective. Horror soon followed when he saw the problem reappearing on his brand new monitor. He made a visit to Apple store and the "Geniuses" were clueless. After performing a few diagnostics and not finding anything they told him that replacing the graphic card only was not possible (on-board Intel GMA) and that repair parts (the entire motherboard) would cost over $500 not even counting the labor.
I took the mini home and connected it to my Viewsonic LCD. I was never able to reproduce the problem either even after 3 days of tests and web browsing use. After a quick investigation I realized he was connecting his mini to his monitor using a VGA cable and the VGA-to-DVI adapter. I then returned the mini to him and suggested to switch for a proper DVI cable and since then the problem never reappeared. I concluded the problem was either the adapter or the analog-to-digital video converter in the mac mini GPU. Any comment from a computer technician here ?
cheers
ah, also before you flame me, mac mini is still a great machine 🙂
/Sam