MacBook Pro NVIDIA graphics card probs

[Colin McDonald]

My 16 month old 15" MacBook Pro just got fixed under the recall. I nearly had a cardiac arrest when I noticed the amount charged by the Apple Store to AppleCare warranty for the repair - £753.17! OK, it was covered by the recall AND I have AppleCare, but that kind of repair cost would be bordering on the "non-economic" if you had to pay for it. Currently all affected models are covered by the recall for 3 years after purchase. My advice would be check and see if yours is affected (See Apple support article at MacBook Pro: Distorted video or no video issues) and get it replaced.

Affected models are

MacBook Pro 15-inch and 17-inch models with NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics processors

* MacBook Pro (17-Inch, 2.4GHz)
* MacBook Pro (15-Inch, 2.4/2.2GHz)
* MacBook Pro (Early 2008)

[Robert Lane]

"Holy cooked-GPU, Batman!"

I'm glad Apple finally outed a recall on this (Between Toyota, Honda and Apple 2010 looks like the "year of the recall" !)

For those not familiar with this issue, enclosed is a screenshot of exactly what happens when the 8600M GT card gets goofy; just so happens I have a MBP that's part of the recall and need to get it fixed up.

I've seen it get much worse than this; sometimes entire windows of full of splashed colors, bizarre patterns and wobbly-blurry text. When it first happened to my machine I was fully expecting the entire screen to die within seconds, but every-time this happens a simple "Log Out" and back into the machine clears it.

Can't wait to get it fixed.

[David Chapman]

Crap, I have one of these computers, but I don't see any video problems.

[Colin McDonald]

Mine only started showing problems last week, David. In my case the display suddenly lost every 2nd pixel horizontally, resulting in tiny vertical grey lines down the screen and a washed out appearance. The screen also turned a rather fetching pink colour

I had to reduce resolution to 800x600 to read text and menus. The first time it happened a restart fixed it, but it went again a few hours later and stayed like that, so I phoned AppleCare.

Needless to say, it started working normally again just before they inspected it at the Apple Store, but they ran a testing programme and confirmed that it was able to be replaced under recall.

[Greg Chisholm]

Originally Posted by Colin McDonald

My 16 month old 15" MacBook Pro just got fixed under the recall. I nearly had a cardiac arrest when I noticed the amount charged by the Apple Store to AppleCare warranty for the repair - £753.17! OK, it was covered by the recall AND I have AppleCare, but that kind of repair cost would be bordering on the "non-economic" if you had to pay for it. Currently all affected models are covered by the recall for 3 years after purchase. My advice would be check and see if yours is affected (See Apple support article at MacBook Pro: Distorted video or no video issues) and get it replaced.

Affected models are

thanks for the heads up guys!

gc

[Andrew Khalil]

yep, had mine for a year and half before I noticed issues. Got it fixed last October for free as well :)

[Mike Moncrief]

Hi Guys,

Just read this thread.. and realizing that I own one of these machines... :{

But I found this link :

take a look..

Apple Extends MacBook Pro NVIDIA GeForce Service Policy to Three Years

[Colin McDonald]

Mike, I'm not clear what that link tells us that we didn't know already. Am I missing something?