Q: Red and green square dots?

I suspect all browsers at this point. After rebooting, the system crashed while using Safari this morning. At least with Mountain Lion I was only dealing with square dots after I removed some login items. Now it crashes daily no matter what I try to do.

Is there anyone here who is talking to applecare support? If so please hold their heat to the fire and keep us advised.Thank you

jmf

I'm performing a clean install tonight, keeping the base system and no broswer plugins. Usually when I do this the artifacts appear by Tue/Wed after a few days of normal use.

If they present themselves again, I'll be taking it to my Apple Service Provider, they will reach out to AppleCare on my behalf. I will let you know if it comes to that and include updates.

Thanks,

Haymoose

Tonight the iMac was out of control. It was like the northern lights over Canada. Large triangle flashes, whole screen splashes of green and constant crashes when I tried to open a browser. I booted from the Rescue disk (holding down Option on startup), and repaired the disk and rebuilt permissions. So far so good. Let me know what you get with the clean install.

jmf

Jack,

I just finished my clean install of Mavericks. I avoided those App/plugins I suspect might be the reason for my issues. The counter started today at 4PM. I'll post an update the minute I see the little grids and dots show up again since this fresh install.

HayMoose

Haymoose, if it works please be sure to let us know what apps etc you made sure not to install.

Still not clear if this is a 3rd party kernal extention interfering with the video driver, or if it is an updated bad video driver itself...which means this may have come in a system update a while ago and will be there unless you re-install 10.7 or 10.8 and don't run updates (and maybe a slim chance we can dig the old driver up and force replace it).

It is tough to troubleshoot because it usually is not there after a reboot but starts to show up after hours or days. It is most apparent in web graphics, I think that are using video accelleration effects for shading etc. Just very annoying seeing pixels and graphics all over my monitor which flash with typing or disk access or other motion. Thankfully my actual hard crashes have been minimal.

I'll include an image of what I'm seeing right now as an example.

Wow Josh, you have a far worse issue then me.

After a fresh new clean install of Mavericks, I am still seeing the issue. No Chrome, No Flash. No AntiVirus.

Screenshot:

I opened Activity monitor and took a screenshot about a minte later and noticed this service still running and locked up: "QTKitServer-(29000) Safari" however I feel it might be unrelated.

I am seeing those squared now in my browser window but the service is not vaprolocked at this moment.

I'll be taking it in next week, Mon/Tues. I do still have AppleCare and I'll keep you posted.

HayMoose

Moose, most of the time I see exactly what you have, small red or green or magenta blotches.

Once in a while though it gets very bad and several graphic elements in safari only get random noise like that.

They clearly toggle their state with hard drive access or mouse/keybopard traffic. Another thought I had was the menumeters etc usage graphs that we both have in our menubars which also monitor drive usage etc. I see you have them too.

Lucky you have applecare. Mine is an '11 refurb so no luck for me. I just wish we could narrow down exactly what is causing this, but it sure seems like a low level software change.

I wonder if @JackFox is running iStat?

Josh, I will remove it from both my machines today and see the impact over the weekend.

Oh, and to top it off, it's presenting itself om my early 2011 (AMD Radeon HD 6770M) MBP 8,3 now too.

I'll continue to keep you guys posted.

HayMoose

No iState here. I do have Contact Sync (Google Contacts), Skydrive, ScanSnap Manager and Microsoft Database Daemon running.

jmf

I found a way to temporarily get rid of them. If I click my mouse anywhere near the red dots, and then drag the mouse so that it creates a blue box over the red square dots, they will dissapear. Anyone else getting this same response? This is still quite a nuisance that must get some attention from Apple.

I was about to change my cursor size back to normal, but I thought I would ask first if anyone here has enabled any Accessibility options?

jmf

I have been having this problem for 6 months. After installing Mavericks it has turned vicious. Anytime my mac sleeps for several minutes I have trouble waking it. Bad news is the little squares grow into big ones like this. Not sure why this pic has flipped. This is a total crash. I am now having the type of frequent crashing I used to have in the era of os9. ?????

I am using the Early 2011 Macbook Pro

2GHz i7

8gb 1333Mhz DDr3

AMD Radeon HD 6490M 256MB

You’re not alone Benjamin102. I have a 27” iMac with 2Tb drive. Today I removed Checkmate diagnostics and Numi calculator, both resident apps. I haven't seen any dots or crashes that were increasing with use.

jmf