White crystals on LED of my MacBook 2008 late edition

Good day,

If you wish us to suggest vendors that may have a replacement display, please give us a rough idea of where you are in the world. These are international user-to-user forums and we have no way to see where you are.

It does you little good if we find a seller who is an airplane ride away, or does not ship to your country or region.

It may be easy to buy another Macbook of the same model and scavenge its display. Sometime entire computers are far cheaper than individual parts.

Cheers!

While you might be able to connect and use an external display with that Mac, I'd expect an involved hardware repair to replace the display.

And a repair and parts cost probably not worth the cost for a Mac most of twenty years old.

You'll want to look around for the scale and scope of the repair from a repair-focused website, and also look for the availability and price of the replacement parts.

I'd expect to have to disassemble the entire MacBook to get access to and replace the display. Everything.

And it may not work after the repair, if something goes wrong during disassembly and reassembly.

Linux will probably work with an old Mac.

"White crystals on LED of my MacBook 2008 late edition: I have 2008 MacBook late edition . I used to do photoshop editing on it. Now..I see that due to moisture, the LED screen has gone nuts. There are many crystals on the screen and the patch size is increasing day by day. I had plans to install ubuntu on it as the laptop condition is still great. How can I fix the LED crystal issue. Does anyone even has the LED screen for this matchbook 2008 please help. KT electronics was suggested by someone."

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Any Buldging?:

If you notice any bulging, then there may be corrosion due to overheating and/or expansion from cooling in humidity (which is why it is wise to use a dehumidifier, if used in the lower level of your house).

Mirror this:

You can go for a new screen. But, using an external one, you can mirror it with the following on your Mac's keyboard: [Hold Down: command key, then press and release F1]

ssk_shamal wrote:

one more question. ubuntu works on old macbook...right?

I have no idea what happened to the LCD panel. It almost looks like some chemical may have gotten onto the screen which reacted badly with the screen. It also almost looks like a condensation issue. Only someone who can physically examine the laptop can even attempt to try & identify what happened. I've never seen anything like it in 25 years.

Yes, Linux will work on the 2007-2015 Macs including a 2008 MacBook. While I have installed & used Linux on an old Aluminum MacBook which had only 2GB of memory, Linux works much better with 4GB+ of memory. It is possible to custom install Linux to remove some of the automatic features in order to reduce its memory footprint....I was able to do this years ago so that Linux was only using 70MB of memory while booted to the Desktop (a normal install would have been using 400MB+).

I do not recommend using Ubuntu (at least not the default installation that uses GNOME since that requires a computer with lots of system resources....fast CPU, GPU hardware acceleration, and lots of memory). Kubuntu may be fine or another Ubuntu flavor, but I would recommend Linux Mint instead which is based on Ubuntu and may be a bit more efficient for older systems.

FYI, I would avoid installing Linux on the 2006 white MacBooks with the 32bit Core Duo CPU because that model has defective firmware....I've bricked two of those 2006 white MacBooks by updating the bootloader & PRAM using Linux....and I mean a real brick where there is absolutely no indications of life (both were working perfectly fine until then). I've never had any issues using Linux with any of the later models from 2007-2015.

Hi,

Would you please post screen capture with Sift+Command+3?

We could help you with it.