Q: display anomalies

hey all - i thought i'd just take a minute to describe my current techniques for minimizing this issue. unfortunately, there is no real 'cure' short of replacing the Logic Board (IMHO) and all these strategies do is make my MBP a little more functional...
BUT - they do help, so in a spirit of helping my fellow men (and women), here's what i'm currently doing:

1) first - and perhaps most important - never use your macbook on a soft insulating surface, like a blanket or a bed or a pillow! obvious i know, but i like to watch movies on mine in bed and i now use one of those laptop tray thingys they sell at borders. anyway the point is that the vents are right along the back under the display and if they are blocked at all you will *very very* quickly overheat. so try and always work on a hard flat surface.

2) another low-tech tactic: i shut down my MBP whenever i can. i never used to shut my Apple laptops down, never had to. at night i'd usually just turn the display down all the way, or sometimes i'd put them to sleep... this MBP seemed fine with this treatment for about 12-15 months, but now i find it gets and stays too hot. turning if off is the kinder gentler way.

3) i run Fan Control, i used SMC Fan Control for a long time, but found that i was always fiddling with it and it was annoying. Fan Control is a Preference Pane which means i don't have to worry about launching it or it quitting or what have you, and with the proper settings it seems to work better than constantly tweaking SMC FC - these are the settings i've been using:
Base Speed 2200 rpm
Lower Threshold: 48 °C
Upper Threshold: 70 °C

4) I run Coolbook - a relatively recent app apparently developed to deal with this problem in both the ATI and Nvidia MBP's! this program works its little magic by "undervolting" your CPU, reducing the amount of voltage it uses. the developer's claim that this doesn't effect processing speed or performance (which is apparently dependent on frequency not voltage), and my completely unscientific purely subjective experience has been that this is true - i haven't noticed any performance hit. maybe some MBP gamer out there should do a frame rate comparison before and after, but until then i'm gonna keep using it.
the documentation on this app is pretty abominable so after much trial and error, here are the settings that work *for me* - i'm not going to go into detail about what these mean, go get the app and you'll see what they mean then ok? it would take more energy than i have to explain these settings - that's if i even understood them.
Adapter Pairs:
2171 MHz 1.1000 V
2004 MHz 1.0875 V
1837 MHz 1.0875 V
1670 MHz 1.0750 V
1002 MHz 0.9500 V

Battery Pairs:
2171 MHz 1.1000 V
2004 MHz 1.0875 V
1837 MHz 1.0750 V
1670 MHz 1.0500 V
1002 MHz 0.9500 V

Throttling Level - Medium
Temp. Limit - 75 °C
Throttling - Active
Coolbook - Active

Coolbook takes some tweaking - i had to play with these settings for about half a day till i got it working right - too little voltage and you get kernel panics! basically you lower till you get panics and then come up a notch till you don't, sounds scary i know but using my figures as a baseline more or less eliminates that step - again, these work for me so you might be different, but not - i imagine - all that different.

5) this last app doesn't actually help reduce temps but its invaluable - iStat. this little app displays vital info in your menubar - CPU/GPU temp, Fan Speed, CPU load etc - and like all the other apps here - it's free!

---

So, what's the outcome of all this effort?
well - my MBP averages about 48-55 °C, much better than without all this stuff! the fans like to run themselves around 3200-3500 rpm most of the time which is noisy but not intolerable (earbuds help). it behaves itself just fine if i'm doing non-graphic intensive things like writing and editing documents, surfing most of the web (see below), even using Logic. if i'm going to do something like check out some heavy bandwidth Flash sites, or do a lot of Photoshop work, i keep one eye on the temp reading but with this setup i rarely have to do anything more than sometimes take a short break when the artifacts start to show up. if i'm going for broke and trying to watch a full length feature movie on Hulu, or a 90 min Flash video then i manually turn the fan up to 6000 rpm with SMC Fan Control, and then when (not if!) the display artifacts start to show, i take the battery out, and take more frequent 'cool-down' breaks.

but - overall the result is that my MBP has been transformed from being nearly unusable to being usable nearly all the time.
i'd like to hear if these things work for anyone else... or better? or worse? or not at all?
i got sick of holding my breath and waiting for Apple to help with this problem. i still feel cheated, and i still want to keep making as much noise about this as possible in the distant hope that Apple will heed our call - but at least, now in the meantime, i can watch 5 min Conan O'Brian clips!
cheers,
bennett

forgot to specify, in case anyone cares, i have a 1st gen Macbook Pro 2.16 MHz Core Duo with 2GB of RAM...
also i thought i'd propose a catchy name for this malady - "SCREEN-FREEZE"
it even almost rhymes!
=)
cheers,
bennett

mgcjg - i hear your pain man, these problems didn't really occur in ernest until after 14 months or so - and i too had neglected to buy applecare. if i can make a suggestion to any and all - it is possible to purchase insurance - renters insurance and/or laptop insurance on your MBP - i have a $140 policy i purchased that covers ANY accidental damage as well as theft to the tune of $2000, i may file a claim based on this problem... but i'm hoping some idiot at the coffee shop spills his latte on my baby in the meantime
i'm only half joking.
anyway, just thought you'd all like to know.

and BTW mgcjg, congrats on buying a new unibody - hopefully in 15 months you won't have these problems all over again - i assume you bought the applecare this time
bennett

Hi you,

please let us focus to the facts.

*1. none of us misbehaved his macbook,*
*2. it's a hardware error, there is nothing you can do about software to fix it*
*3. is there anybody who get something else than nothing from apple. that's what interesting*
*4. Has anybody a new idea what to do about (except keeping your macbook cool)*

don't to so big text's here nobody can read all that stuff. keep it simple

thanks and bye

Great lineup of solutions, most of them I also use for months now, but that can't be the solution.

It's like Aston Martin selling us a car with a faulty gearbox that might crash at speeds above 120mph ... I don't want to be told "skip a gear", or "easy on the throttle" or other solutions, I want my car to WORK as it should!

I am having exactly the same issues as described in the post here: horizontal lines, distorted graphics, and a triangled color gradient. My Mac also increasingly starts to freeze when it gets (slightly) hotI'm using a MacBook Pro with ATI x1600 from April 2006.

While reading the posts, I noticed that there has been a rapid increase in people reporting the same problem here in recent months. This appears to be a problem that only shows up after most of us have run out of warranty.

I do not have Apple Care, but will visit an Apple Store shortly to make Apple aware of this problem, and hopefully to solve it.

Everyone who's got the same problem, do participate in this effort to have Apple recognize the problem: http://petition.theatypical.net/

Message was edited by: AlamoJ

macuser - if you are responding to my post than perhaps you haven't read it properly. i specifically state that there is *no way to fix the issue short of replacing your logic board*
however, these are coping strategies that have helped minimize the problem *for me* - take it or leave it.
i am guessing that english is not your first language so i understand that long posts might be distasteful to you - if that's the case then, hey - don't read them! no offense - but i spent a fair bit of my time writing that post in the hope that it would *help some of the other people on this forum* cope at least partially with this issue.
i agree it's not "fixable" via software and overall i am ****** off that i have to spend so much time and energy managing a machine that is supposed to be a top of the line piece of kit.
anyway i believe this post - like all my others - stands or falls on its own merits so i will shut up now.
bennett

LX97 - its exactly like that except its more like it becomes undrivable due to front end wobble above 60mph!
i agree, these are unsatisfactory "solutions" - i still want Apple to come out and admit this issue exists and make some kind of offer to us all... in the meantime tho - i gotta do all i can to make this thing as usable as i can cause i can't afford another machine just yet!
and anyway i'd like to wait at least 12 more months to make sure the new unibodies don't all start having these same problems!
sad to say but my consumer confidence in Apple has been shaken by this.
*HERE THAT APPLE?*
cheers,
bennett

one more thing - and i hope it doesn't have to come to this - but here's something you all should take a look at...
http://www.sfmslaw.com/pages/cases.php?id=752
just putting it out there...
b

Telling from the tips people have been giving in this thread in recent days, it appears that many of the new folks that have arrived here never found the following info, mentioned some weeks ago.

Although this is almost certainly a hardware problem, it's the use of quartz extreme that seems to particularly trip it up. By turning off quarz extreme you will cripple any software such as VLC and many games, but will have a system that should not cause any drawing glitches or freeze up on you.

Doing the following in the Terminal will turn quarz extreme off:

defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver GLCompositor -dict tileHeight -int 0 tileWidth -int 0

and this turns it back on:

defaults delete /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver GLCompositor

Both when turning it off and on, you will need to restart for the change to take effect.

So far I haven't seen anybody posting about any screen artifacts or freezes when quarz extreme is off. Of course, this isn't the real solution, but for the time being you might be happier with crippled software as a temporary workaround for the broken hardware.

chris - i tried this when it was posted and in fact did experience a screen-freeze, but perhaps i didn't do it correctly. most likely pilot error
i'm going to try it again and see. thanks a lot for this tho. any tips are appreciated
b

quick question about this - if i execute the terminal command in my primary user account and then restart and then log in and use a different account i assume that quartz extreme will still be de-activated... is this correct?
thanks
b

I believe they are per user, not system wide, but I'm not sure.

Scratch that. It's in /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver - so, it must be system wide.

thanks - going to try it now... after reboot i'm going to stream 3 hours of video from Hulu! trial by fire!
b