MBP Screen Briefly Flashes Black

[masterjedi747]

Can anyone help me out here? It's not flickering... but the screen literally appears to turn off, then comes back on again a second or two later.

It happened twice in a row about a week ago (and then stopped, so I figured I'd let it go), but it just happened again right now, so I'm figuring there's got to be something else going on. My only guess would be the battery... but I just had that replaced a few months ago, so it seems kind of odd to be having problems already. If it is the battery, how severe of a problem would this be? Is there something I could do to fix it, or can I just live with it until the end of the school year... or do I need to have this fixed ASAP? (And on the off chance that this is a related problem, my speakers have been making that funny crackling/static sound when I wake the computer up from sleep... I was reading some threads about that around here, but to the best of my knowledge the problem was never really resolved.)

Neither problem is quite big enough to annoy me terribly... but I'd just like to make sure I'm not ignorantly heading toward any big disasters in the near future. Thanks in advance.

 

[forgottensoft]

This could be a problem with the sensor in the screen latch that cause the screen to turn off when you close the lid. I would geta can of air and spray inside that latch. It might be a little sticky

 

[MagnusVonMagnum]

I'm having the same problem in Leopard right now with my PowerMac. It doesn't have a battery so that's not it. I read a post somewhere where someone seemed to have a similar thing happening and they took it to have Apple look at theirs and they diagnosed it as having a bad power supply. I really couldn't say if that's the case here. The screen goes black like the monitor turned off for a second and then comes back on. Nothing else seems to happen. It's very bizarre, but it has done it twice tonight. I've never seen it before now. The PowerMac is from 2001 and has more than a few upgrades in it including new 1.5TB Seagate Barracuda drives so the power supply starting to go a little bit spotty isn't exactly beyond belief.

I did, however, change the screensaver today to a slideshow based one and so I cannot rule out that as a possibility of somehow being related, although it could just as easily be a coincidence. I changed the screensaver after the machine gave a kernel panic while playing Jedi Academy. I walked away from the computer for several minutes and it was just sitting there with the game idling on a certain level and it crashed/panicked. I thought maybe the screensaver tried to kick in during the game and caused a conflict there. The screensaver is one of those Linux conversions ("Lament" puzzle box screensaver from the Hellraiser movies) and so I thought maybe it'd be better to run an Apple based one. I don't know why the slideshow one would try to kick on and then off while I'm in the middle of doing something, though, but I've never used it before so as far as I know it could have some odd glitch too for all I know. The screen going black for a second sure does LOOK like the screensaver kicking in to black just before the first slideshow picture would appear and then returns to the desktop so I can't dismiss it at this point as a possibility. I'm going to switch it back and see if it happens again.