A friend of mine recently purchased a MacBook Pro (I think it was last year sometime). She showed me a video where the screen image is moving side to side, intermittently. It's kind of a flicker side to side. She has restarted the computer and has the same problem. She had a third-party external HD hooked in, but then restarted the computer without the external HD and is still having the same problem. Any thoughts on this would be appreciated.
Do you know what Mac OSX version she is running?
It sounds like something that can be fixed by changing trackpad setting in System Preferences > Trackpad. Have her click the "More Gestures" tab at the top and uncheck "Swipe between pages" and "Swipe between full-page apps." See if that helps.
My mother-in-law has an MacBook Pro and the default trackpad setting were making her crazy. During a visit I noticed she was inadvertently dragging her "pinky" finger when moving the cursor and the trackpad saw that as a two-finger swipe. The screen was trying to scroll when she did that. I disabled the boxes I show above and she abandoned her plans of tossing the computer in the bin!
Here is what that preference pane looks like:
If the flicker continues, that could herald problems with the video hardware and she should have Apple look at it.
Most anti-virus programs do more harm to Macs that good. She has either a trackpad setting issue or a hardware issue. Right now teh only threasts to Macs are adware and nost AV programs don't stop them anyway; only prudent browsing habits help. What she found was probably a Windows virus attached to an e-mail that won;t install and run on any Mac.
PLEASE don't have her update the OS until the problem is resolved. It is unlikely to help and may cause things to get worse. 😮
Hi Allan, thanks for the response. I had her run an antivirus just in case, which returned that she has the FakeAlert trojan, which has a suffix of BYP. We're trying to address that issue first using a number of programs. She tried your suggestion about the trackpad and I don't believe that that solution worked in her case. The screen is moving around and I don't know what version of the OS she has. When the antivirus program stops, I'll have her update the OS if necessary.
Thanks,
Matt
Thanks Allan for the input. The problem seems to have resolved itself one way or another. If it happens again, I'll recommend that she bring it to the Apple Store because it does sound like it's possibly a hardware problem.
Best,
Matt
MacBook Pro screen moving side to side
