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farbRausch

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 1, 2012
58
0
Hey,
we have a (quite) old 17" MBP mid 2007. Recently, when booting the machine the display shows vertical color bands and then stays black. However, the machine boots up internally. I can tell since I managed to open iTunes via shortcuts and play music and keyboard backlight works as well. Even though the display stays black, one can see that the display backlight sort of works, e.g. the difference between the lowest setting (display completely shut off) and a backlit display is clearly noticeable.

Now, I assume there 3 potential causes:
1) the display
2) the logicboard
3) the display cable (although tilting the display seems to have no effect, so no flickering etc.)

Is there any way I can distinguish between those? If the display was broken I will be willing to install a new one, whereas it's probably not worth it to buy a new logicboard. I went to an apple store, but they just told me that the machine was obsolete and they couldn't help.

Many thanks in advance!
 
Plug it into another monitor/TV and see what happens. It does sound like the display though - if it was the logic board your machine most likely wouldn't boot.
 
Thanks, excellent idea. Went to the office this morning. External Display works. Thus, I will see if I can get a display somewhere.
 
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