Colored vertical lines on PB 17" display

another 2 days, another defect line (#25).

Send me the t-shirt, I'm now in the W85 17" PowerBook club too. At least if you let in those of us who have blinking bars of horizontal lines on the right hand third of the screen.

It's like the center third of the screen is getting intermixed with the right hand third. If there's white in the center of the screen, the right hand side is fine.

And here I was thinking I'd finally get three years out of a PowerBook...

So the flickering lines came and went. Weirdly, they seemed to pop up most often when Flash was playing, but no real way to confirm.

But wait, there's more! I've now lost the right 1/3 of the screen. In that third, the left 2/3 is completely black, and the right third mirrors the middle 1/9 of the whole screen. In other words:

left |1|2|3|4|5|6|X|X|5| right

So the useable space is perfectly square. How wonderful. At least the flickering has stopped.

I am dreading calling Apple.

I got a quotation of 634 € to replace the LCD. I'm now checking eBay
for a defective PB with intakt LCD and replace the part myself.

Btw, does somebody know if I might install 1650x1080 instead
of 1440x900 ?

The info of Apple service was that there is no replacement
program planned for now. Perhaps in the future.

Selling AppleCare, two and half year after purchase, has been refused.

last week i was on vacation, the powerbook stayed at home, not running. no additional defect line.

this week, back at work, got line #26.

one more, #27. really funny...

My 17" PB just started getting the described lines yesterday. My serial number starts with W840....

Add me to the club. When do I get my membership package?

Message was edited by: Mike_H

#28...

Joined the club.

Started with one line comming and going. Now i have 8 vertical lines in my Powerbook G4 17". Costed me 2500 euros and was bought because i´m a designer. Maybe this lines can be used to align objects to stage, RRRRRrrrrrrrrr...

I went to the apple shop (i´m in Portugal) and they said that the only thing they could do is send for apple to repair under the payment of 500/600 euros. ARE YOU KIDDING WITH ME? I´m a worker as all the people here and the money doesn´t comes from the trees, we need the hardware to work and we pay a lot of money for this hardware, for this apple.

If it was only one or two defective PB but there are so many! One thing is for sure. I´m investing a lots of money in my Design firm, new hardware. But i won´t take the risk of buying rotten apple.

Take care, its a jungle out there...

looks like my display is entering high speed destruction mode -- 29 defect lines now.

that means over 2% of my display pixels are unusable (total of 1440 vertical lines)

Message was edited by: tuscan

Ohhh... It will be very soon!

@ROBOT

Hello, long time no see... some other line? I have 5 more. How is going with your PB ? did you contact Dennis Wingo?
Why all we are so unlucky?

take care, everybody !...

reached 30 defect lines today.

"...I'm now onto the final third before my APP ends - does anyone know how to create the VL problem so I can have it replaced FOC, for a third time, before APP expires? ..."

I know what you should do...

Swap your good screen with one of us then take it to Apple for repairs, after a week swap that new screen with another one of us and take the bad one for repairs - and keep doing this until we all have our machines repaired and Apple have (inadvertently) taken the responsibility they should be taking.

Incredible!
I've just been searching these forums to see if i could find any answer to a problem exactly as Ive seen described here last month(feb 2008) on my 17' powerbook G4. never has a problem with it before. purchased via the apple website in early may 05 and yes, manufactured in china with the serial number W8 prefix..

having experienced no trouble with the laptop in nearly 3 years i turned it on last month to find the screen displaying vertical black lines with pink/purple colouration on either side which changed slowly to blues.
It was definetly a screen issue because it worked fine when i plugged in an external monitor. That laptop could not be repaired and has now died a death
This is definetly a manufacturing problem if so many of us have suffered this on the G4 Powerbooks of early 2005 with the W8 serial. There's no way this is coincidence