Does anyone get an issue with their Mac after waking it, where the screen is completely unusable. Bits of your window are displayed, but it's a jumbled mess and you can't see what it is that's supposed to be displayed?

My machine has done it twice now and it's quite annoying. I have to log out and log back in again to resolve it.

I've never put mine to sleep, so couldn't tell you.

Do you shut it down?

I used to do that lol

It's quite common when "moving over" to Mac haha

I'll bet that in a year, you will only turn off/restart your Mac for updates.

What advantage do I gain by making it sleep? Doesn't that consume/waste power? :/

I would argue that no it doesn't.

It keeps contents of memory in memory, and pulses an LED. That's it, so hardly any power at all.

I don't have any figures, but my hunch is that it uses no more power than the machine will use to boot.

I switch off at the mains when I'm not using the computer, so I don't sleep them...

However there was, in the dim and distant past, an issue with display corruption. The change to using system memory instead of dedicated video memory caused minor screen corruption when coming out of sleep, but that was in the early days...

IIRC, sleeping uses so little power, it probably isn't much of a waste, certainly I've left my MacBook on sleep and off charge for a week, and I cam back and it reported that the battery was 99% full still...
I find I get better performance out of my Mac after a few hours, not when I first turn it on.

Nick, I get a similar problem when waking my MacBook with an external monitor plugged in, but it only effects my mouse...

What do you mean it only effects the mouse??

I'm at work right now so I can't post a screenshot but I took a couple before, so I'll post them later when I get home.

The screen is complete garbage,with bits of window all over the place. The mouse moves around fine though, although you can't see the pointer. You can see where the mouse is travelling because it refreshes that little part of the screen. Even after it refreshes though, it's still garbage. Just different to before lol

Okay, so here are some screenshots (click on them if you want to see a larger version).



And:



As you can see, it's not complete crap. You can see, for example, that in one of the screenshots I had BBC News and iTunes open at the time.

These are particularly bad examples. Sometimes it is just sections of the screen which do it (you can see in one of the images, that the menu bar is fine, for example).

I hate to say it, but to me that looks like a problem with the RAM on the video card. It could equally be a driver issue though. What sort of Mac is it again? And is it entirely up to date?

Jon

It's a first gen MacBook, and it's bang up to date.

I've got to say, it wouldn't surprise me to hear it was a hardware fault with the video card. Very occasionally the screen flickers. It was a bit scary at first, but I've got used to it now. It only tends to do that when it's "cold" ie the first few seconds after turning the screen on.

This issue has so far only occurred when waking the machine from sleep.

Is it repeatable? What happens if you restart? does it do the same after that?

A restart every now and then helps keep things running smoothly.

That is the problem that was known with the first gen MacBooks, when they first came out (it was well discussed in the first few months of the Inter MacBook's release. I thought Apple had long since addressed it though.

It could be a sign of impending failure of either the system RAM or the graphics chipset (the MacBook shares its memory with the main system, which was a cause of the problem, originally, because Apple had never had to deal with a machine with shared memory before.

This is a first gen machine.

I can't get it to repeat, and it hasn't done it for a few days now.

It's odd. I just hope it isn't hardware!