New MacbookALU 2.0ghz ISSUES

[topper1987]

Hey I bought a New macbook aluminum a month and a half ago. I've upgraded the RAM(crucial 2X2) to 4gigs and upgraded to a scorpio 320gb hard drive...now to the issue's. Its been working like a dream the past week and a half and then last night videos on youtube and just videos in general (tried playing a DVD but ill tell you about that later) would get these wierd flickery boxes in them even how the OKAY button on some windows (how thier animated fading in and out of blue) were flashing a bit. So I restarted and it seemed to fix it for a while then I noticed happened just for a split second on a vid i was watching. My next problem is that when I put a DVD in the drive it wouldnt let me play it because of the region the DVD was in and my SuperDrive was Diff.? My Drive is set to Reg. 1 and it happended on a couple of the DVD's I tried to play. ANY HELP WOULD BE SO APPRECIATED!

 

[Matek]

I can't say anything definite about the graphical issues you're mentioning, but judging from your description, you could be experiencing artifacts caused by hardware issues. If this continues to happen or even gets worse, you should bring your MacBook in for warranty.

The DVD region problem is a common issue, caused by the film industry. The world is divided into regions and all DVDs sold in one place should have the same DVD region. This is supposed to prevent people in one area from watching DVDs from another region, because they might not even be released to theaters in their region and that would lower profits for the film industry.

In reality, the region system simply annoys customers, because one can often buy DVDs from different regions. There are a couple of solutions - the drive should let you change your region five times (it should be an option somewhere in System Preferences or the DVD application I guess). You can also rip your DVDs with software like Handbrake and watch them from your hard drive without region issues. But the only real workaround is to flash your optical drive with a region free firmware. It's a slightly difficult procedure, read more about it here.