I had written a few Mac related posts and was going to continue with that theme for a while, however my MacBook Pro took a dump. This is old news to me, but new news to you because it actually all went down over a month ago and I’ve been too lazy to write about it.
The night it began I was fiddling with Unity3D and all of a sudden my screen did something I had never seen before on any of my computers. Putting this into words is very difficult as what I saw is hard to explain. It looked as if tiny pieces of my screen were cutout and replaced with black emptiness – similar to a patch pattern or something like that. Think of taking a finely knit blanket, stretching it out so the little holes are slightly enlarged, then overlay that on your screen. Visualize it being inverted, being the solid part transparent and the holes will be black. That in a nutshell is what my screen looked like. Anyway, I rebooted and the same deal happened when it came back up. I gave up and turned the laptop off for the night. The next day it was fine and was running normal for a week until one night the screen turned off. I powered it off and tried it again. Now it’s finally toast. It gets power (keyboard lights up, hard drive revs up, etc) but just no screen.
I Googled some things to try but nothing has worked. Diagnosing hardware isn’t my area of expertise, but from what I can gather either the screen is bad or the video card crapped out. I’ve been told this is a common problem with first generation MacBook laptops(?). I also called a few places and apparently it’ll cost between $250-$400 to have my MacBook repaired. I hooked up a DVI cable and I didn’t get anything on my external monitor so I’m leaning more towards the video card dying.
I’m not in a rush to have my MacBook fixed. My future articles are going to cover Linux. I was thinking of writing Linux versions of my Ogre3D posts.
