First of all, let me thank everyone that looked at my screenshots and left all that great feedback both here, at cleverhack and at TUAW.
Last night I bought a FireLite external hard drive and backed up my Macbook with SuperDuper. This morning I went in to see the Genius Bar at the Apple Store in Marlton. Fortunately (!) the artifacting was readily apparent when I showed it to the guys at the bar.
They tried a network boot first, to see if it was a hardware issue. Several of you suggested that it might have to do with the unintegrated video card or the untested architecture. Didn’t seem to be the problem here, though.
They guy noticed that I was using FileVault and groaned. Apparently, he’s seen a lot of issues around FileVault. When I pressed him about it, though, he backpedaled a bit and said the use of FileVault simply makes it difficult for him to manipulate things if there’s a problem.
He then opened Disk Utility and then checked to see if there were any problems with disk permissions. Eureka! There were pages and pages of problems. Clearing these problems seemed to fix my graphics problem. My Genius explained that FileVault tends to compound these problems, and that if I’m going to continue to use FileVault, it would be a good practice to clear up any permission problems once a week or so.
So there you go. I also went home and turned off the secure virtual memory option in FileVault, as some of you have suggested I do.
I guess I now have a weekly maintenance ritual to undergo:
- Finder > Secure Empty Trash
- Shift-CMD-U, Open Disk Utility, Select my hard drive, Click “Repair Disk Permissions”
- Logout, Log back in on my non-FileVault backup account (with the shift key down to eliminate startup programs), Launch SuperDuper to make a complete backup of my hard drive
Sensible and not bad considering all the hoops I had to undergo for my PC.
Okay all you veterans… Is this it? Anything else I should be doing?
I’m no veteran, but from all the threads I was reading on Apple forums it was assumed that 10.4.7 would fix things, (apart from the other suggested solutions which you’ve also tried).
This and some of the other issues are annoying, cause I can’t wait to buy a Macbook :D
Check out http://www.johnwaller.org/apple/macbook/ that guy seems to have been one of the first with these graphics issues.
And out of curiousity what OS version 10.4.X are you using? Have you updated yet?
Actually, I just took my Macbook out of sleep this morning and guess what?
Maybe my problem isn’t resolved just yet…
Sigh. I might just wait to see if 10.4.7 is going to fix this.
I have 10.4.6 right now.