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Mysterious line of pixels

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Problem- I'm getting these weird lines appearing on both the Macbook Pro LCD and my external LCD. It happens completely random and no crashing of apps occurs. It shows up on the desktop, Safari, FCP, and almost all other apps. It's not that big of a deal and sometimes you can move a Finder window over it to make it disappear. But it is bothering me when doing some editing and web design. I have captured a screenshot of it occurring in Safari.

http://www.sethmccollum.info/Picture_1.png

Macbook Pro-Intel Core Duo, Mac OS X (10.5.5)

Posted on Sep 24, 2008 3:00 PM

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58 replies

Sep 27, 2008 9:23 AM in response to sethersauce

I am having a similar issue, but only on my attached external display. waves pixels are not matching the proper display. However oddly enough this is appearing on some backgrounds and not others. It appears on my current screensaver, but not on any window opened on the screen. It just started happening over the last week and has me a little worried as to what is causing it, and I would sure like to know how it can be fixed pronto. By not affecting the actual display output in any direct or constant way it seems as though it is a software thing?

Message was edited by: Mint1

Sep 28, 2008 7:34 AM in response to sethersauce

Count me in too. I just bought my MBP, used, with a fresh install of Leopard. When I was going through the setup process, of course the system automatically updated to 10.5.5. I get these lines at random times on my screen while I'm working (just flashed up while writing this post). Here's some samples of what I get.

this was yesterday:

http://i35.tinypic.com/28a0s2d.jpg

this is right now:

http://i33.tinypic.com/2cdaog7.jpg

Does anyone have an idea as to what is causing this and why? I don't have Applecare since I bought this used.

The computer I'm referring to is NOT the PowerBook listed in my profile. Here are my MBP specs:

MacBook Pro 15"
2.16 GHz
2GB RAM
667 MHz
OSX 10.5.5

Any insight and/or help is GREATLY appreciated.

Sep 28, 2008 12:20 PM in response to sethersauce

I have this as well, and it has been an issue for about 3 or 4 months now. I thought it could be an overheating issue, but have seen it happen when I have SMC fans running max speed and my MBP being at a low temp.
I wish someone knew what was causing this.
Also, i had spilt water on my AC adapter about 7 months ago, and it ran fine until just recently it started to smoke so I went ahead and bought a new ac adapter...one of my thoughts was that my bad Ac adapter was sending too high of a voltage causing graphical errors within my MBP...not sure if that is the case cause I have not seen any of these lines of pixels since I bought a new adapter. Along with these pixel lines everyone is seeing, my computer sometimes freezes when using graphics heavy programs (Photoshop/iphoto/watching a video on iTunes @ same time ect) And am not sure if it is linked to the graphical pixel lines.

Hope someone can help, here is a picture of the pixel lines I managed to get:
[IMG] http://i2.photobucket.com/albums/y5/AlexPuckett/Messupx2.jpg[/IMG]

Sep 29, 2008 2:39 PM in response to sethersauce

This is definitely not just your laptop. Please look at these threads.

http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=8175266#8175266
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1732374&tstart=15

I have the same symptoms on my MBP, and they started with version 10.5.4. It seems to happen after I use Photoshop for some period of time and the GPU heat rises into the mid- to upper-60C range.
I believe these problems are all related.

Sep 30, 2008 9:43 AM in response to sethersauce

You can add me as a "me too."

I have a 15 inch MacBook Pro, 2 GHZ with 2 GB of RAM.

I am getting the random horizontal lines, which do not seem to be isolated to a particular application.

My guess is there is something in the video driver that is creating this artifact.... because it did not appear until the last two updates. I was hoping 10.5.5 would solve the issue.

Mysterious line of pixels

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