Red and green square dots?

I am having the same issue - 2010 mid year iMac i5. I have tried just about every suggestion short of replacing hardware. I thought I had it fixed last night after installing a fresh copy of mavericks. When I woke up this morning the computer was frozen. The last thing I did last night was install the latest updates. I then did a clean install of Mountain lion and let it sit... Sure enough the problem came back within an hour - square dots and frozen. This was the first mac I ever purchased and I am now regretting that decision.

We seem to have ourselves a club here. My latest deperate hope is changing display to 1920 x 1080.

jmf

Empty USB ports also helps with this issue on startup. My finder windows aren't scrambled. Plug in your USB devices afterwards. This has me to believe buying replacement video cards are NOT the solution. Basically, need to buy an entirely new computer. Probably won't experience this problem with a new machine. 4 years ago I didn't think I'd have this computer, so whatever, can't expect them to run well after 3 years. And if you ever look at how Apple markets their products, most of their offerings operate on a 2 year cycle. I consider it a miracle my 2010 iMac is running--albeit, on life-support--in 2014.

Just an update:

The Apple Store replaced my logic board, video card and did a clean full install of Mavericks. iMac has been running fine for the last 2.5 weeks. (knock on wood)

Before I even left the Apple Store I stayed there for an hour and did whatever I can to get the iMac to heat up. Since I brought it home I haven't shut it down and have been using it thoroughly watching movies and using Final Cut.

I have the 2010 27".

Billy, was this under Apple Care or did they throw you a bone? ...or, how much did this repair cost you?

Changing display resolution didn't work either, and now I'm replying to my own posts. Apple will need to do something soon. For now lets keep lighting up these forum threads with posts about the "iMac display defect," checkboard screen anomally or random colored square issue/problem. I guess I'm a optimist but I bet if you talk to Apple Care today (warranty or not) there may be an unofficial fix in effect.

jmf

I live 100 miles from a Genuis Bar and would like someone whose had their iMac serviced with success to come forward and shed some light on the price tag to get a 27" 2010 i7 2.93 iMac up to fail-safe specs where Apple is on the hook for making this repair run flawless without a single glitch for 90 days...

...curious if people are getting newer gen iMacs if they pin it on Apple's repair responsibility. This would obviously motivate some of us and also clear the air if we truly have lemons on our hands.

It's not a witches spell, it's a defect. The reason we purchased an Apple was reliability, Apple knows this . We should be making appointments with an Apple Genius to get what we paid for. jmf

Yep, totally, we'd all like Apple to bend, but their warranty terms state otherwise. On paper, Apple Care doesn't help anyone with a 2010 iMac right now.

And no one yet on this topic has disclosed what exactly it's costing them to get this defect corrected to Apple's 90-day guarantee repair specs.

Speak up people, what's it costing you to have Apple bring your glitch to a like-new perfomance? Are they doing it complimentary free-of-charge? Replacing your 2010 with a newer gen iMac? Telling you, "Sorry, buy a new system"?

More proof that this is software/driver based.

I just made my system a triple boot.

In the process I observed a few interesting things.

First I'll repeat, that I recently downgraded from 10.8.5 to 10.6.7 and that has made the issue far less of an issue. Light dotting on the dock and sometimes a bit about it, but never more than that (I am not going to update my system any further until Apple says the update will specifically be clean of this issue). Running 10.8.5 the computer was almost unusable and crashed if I let it go to screensaver or sleep. 25% of the time, when starting VMWare the entire screen would become dotted and unresponsive and I'd have to do a hard reset. Starting some other programs would seemingly cause the dots to cover more area of the screen, until reboot.

I installed in bootcamp, windows 8.1. Was using bootcamp drivers 5.0.33. Did not notice any dots, however, I didn't like 8.1 so I only had it running for 45 minutes or so before I wiped it and installed Windows7. I installed the bootcamp drivers v 4.0.x. Ran like that for several days. No dots. I decided to give the 5.0.33 driver a try. Dots appeared within the day and have been reoccuring since. I've never seen the checkerboard effect like you guys are talking about in OSX, however, I got to see it in Windows after installing the 5.0.33 driver. Just like OSX, it is particularly bad when waking from sleep, hibernation or the screen saver. Sometimes, opening certain programs seems to trigger it. Another interesting point, is that I installed windows so I could play games on my laptop. Even if there are dots on the desktop or application windows, they all disappear when I go fullscreen into a game. I've never seen one dot EVER in a full screen game.

For OS number 3, I went with Kali Linux (Debian). I have installed no Apple drivers whatsoever (although I'm pretty sure there aren't any genuine Apple drivers made for Linux anyway). It was a pain in the *** to make it all work with rEFIt and bounce around entries with the MBR, but it boots clean. During my quest to make these 3 OS's work together, I had heard reports of the trackpad not working, missing drivers and other issues that made me think it wasn't going to be functional. However, upon boot in to Kali Linux, EVERYTHING worked. The kicker... no dots. None, I can't go a day without them on OSX 10.6 or Windows7x64(With Bootcamp drivers). It has been almost a week and no dots in Linux. I guarantee if Apple made a Linux display driver and I was dumb enough to install it, I'd have dots there too.

This is NOT a hardware issue. Purely software and drivers. Too bad we all don't live in the same area (at least I assume). I'm Self/Un -Employed. I would totally be down to go protest outside an Apple Store and call the news... Apple would hate that kind of publicity. We could all bring our Macs with screens full of dots. I'd even be up to go back to 10.8.5 just for the protest. I'm very serious. I'm in Escondido / San Diego, CA.

...then I'm really curious what Apple's doing to fix this issue when customers have them serviced through the Genius Bar. You think they're installing new motherboards with a different BIOS driver chipset and just replacing the video cards anyway while under the hood?

It could be neither, just certain hardware and software incompatibility.

jmf

SOULNATIONAL ARCHIVE wrote:

...then I'm really curious what Apple's doing to fix this issue when customers have them serviced through the Genius Bar. You think they're installing new motherboards with a different BIOS driver chipset and just replacing the video cards anyway while under the hood?

I suppose what I mean when I say it's not a hardware issue, is that my chips aren't going bad and I don't have bad video ram or a failing video bus. This is not an overheating issue (my laptop is in a room that is about 60 F right now and not a single part of it is warm, yet there are still dots). Seems this could all be fixed with a targeted software update or patch.

I imagine what they are doing to repair these is changing the logic board or video card to a newer revision or model. If the drivers that install with Mavericks aren't helping us, it seems they must be switching out whatever hardware version that is causing this, because no OSX version between 10.6 and 10.9 has done anything long lasting for any of us.

i have these god **** spots all over my screen. i am about ready to put on a steel toe boot and kick my foot right through my 27" mac . my old mac had a kernel panic, now this one is ******** the bed. i spent $2500 on this pile of crap sitting on my desk.