Snow Leopard (Infamous???) Pixel Lines

[chrisworld]

Hi all. I googled this to hell a while ago... I found some posts about it somewhere with this exact problem, but I just can't remember what the reason was.. And I can't find that source for the life of me.

These things only started showing up after I upgraded to SL, and after they appear, my mac will inevitably hang in 30-45-60 minutes give..or..take.

They show up on ANY window of any application I will use.

But, what is the reason for this?

Attached is a picture of these little buggers in Firefox, as well as a maximum-zoomed in image of them in preview.

 

[Sedulous]

Is it only in your browser?

 

[*LTD*]

I've never seen/heard of this happening. Truly odd.

 

[Sam1487]

I've had this happen to me a few times; usually when I'm using a web browser (which starts it off). Sometimes it just stays in the browser window (wherever I move it to) and other times it affects the actual screen (as if the pixel line is floating on top of everything).

Usually it disappears after a while and switching between apps. Highly annoying though.

 

[chrisworld]

Is it only in your browser?

Any window of any application at any random time.

They also range in colors... this one seems to be green and magenta variations. I've had ones that have every color imaginable in them too.

 

[chrisworld]

I've been doing some digging in google for these problems and found some similar topic about them, but they all seem to point and blame hardware. Specifically the Radeon x1600 (which is what I have).

I find this very hard to believe actually, and I will not accept that my GPU is going bad. This machine is 4 years old and I expect it to still be working fine when I toss it one day for painful obsolesce.

Then..there is of course the possible that, 4 years down the road, every Radeon x1600 has some sort of flaw where the years of operation has caused faulty protected soldier to de-form and cause the connections to come loose (happened to a line of Power Books, didn't it?).

 

[CavemanUK]

just wanted to add that im getting same issue with snow leopard and x1600. Wondering if the (sort of) announced graphics update would fix. I'm on a first generation MacBookPro (the Core Duo version).

Ive tried a fresh install and it even did it on the welcome video before restoring from time machine so I know for sure its not an update, browser issue or other software fault. It was on a completely bare, fresh install of snow leopard 10.6 (no point updates).