Jamie Le Souef

24.02.2009 UPDATE – I’m Now Happy (Jan). Link after the post

I wasn’t expecting my first post here in 2009 to be on the negative side but i have a couple of issues with my iMac and the experience I’ve had with apple dealing with the said iMac that i thought i might shear it with all in the ever clinical interwebs.

Around early December last year I was checking out some videos (killing time) on Apple Quicktime movies when i noticed some rather odd black horizontal and vertical lines showing on the green classification notice at the start of each clip.

Looking closely at these lines i noticed that they were the edges of windows that i had open during that day (mainly my Entourage folders)

It  didn’t go away any time soon and in fact it got precipitately worse over the month of December. I took a 3 week break from work where i only turned on my Mac to check some email and then happily turned it off – i was on holidays last thing i wanted to be doing was anything on my Mac.

So, I reluctantly returned to my desk and the daily grind on the 12th of Jan only to find that some down time for the Mac had done nothing at all. 3 weeks later it just seems to be getting worse. Time to call Apple and get some love out of the AppleCare Protection Plan that cost a pritty penny!

Now, I understand that any tech support crew need to go over the basics – install updates, un-plug it, restart it, make sure it’s not a smear on the screen (honestly!). But after 30 min of ruling out software I was getting a little tired of it.

Finally, I was told they think it’s hardware (duh!). The advice – Run the Mac for 24 hours with just the screen saver running. Yay. This has meant I had to spend a day working in Windows XP which i really didn’t want to do.

After 20 hours there was a power outage (were sweating through 44 degree days at the moment here in Melbourne). I called Apple back told them. They said it MUST run for 24 hours. Then i was told it needs to run for the same amount of time that the burn has been in the screen. 8 weeks. It was suggested by Apple to run my Mac, 24 hours a day with just the screen saver running for 8 weeks. Not bloody likely!

It sounds to me that apple is trying to shirk there responsibility and repair my damaged iMac.

As i said that was not an option they have asked me to send in some photos of the damage to which I’m waiting on a call back.

I will follow up this post with the response to the call.

Just so you know my work environment, I have my iMac set to show the screen savor after 5 min of inactivity, and i use 6 expose windows so I’m jumping all over the place all day.

ISSUE RESOLVED HERE IS THE OUTCOME….

Photo notes

• The photo with the time machine icon was only there for 4 hours of use (I had disconnected the external harddrive during the screen savor test
• The green screen photos were taken before the screen savor test – it is evedent that this cleared up some of the defects but not all – also, i don’t want to wast the power or my time having to run the bloody thing for 24 hours each time there is a blemish – my $150 19″ LCDs hooked up to my XP machine have no burn in them at all and they are 3 years older than my mac.

Related Posts

• February 24, 2009 -- 24″ iMac screen burn – now I’m happy… Jan
• September 2, 2008 -- Ah Ha! OS X is not infallible
• September 6, 2009 -- Twitter Weekly Updates for 2009-09-06
• May 18, 2009 -- Apples Mighty Mouse sticking track ball : My Solution
• February 21, 2009 -- 1987 – Apple Knowledge Navigator

This entry was posted on Friday, January 30th, 2009 at 2:29 pm and is filed under Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

There are 4 Responses to “ 24″ iMac screen burn – not happy jan ”

1

nate Says

hey Jamie, i came across your post yesterday as i was looking for a solution to basically the exact same problem (weird timing huh). i had some ghosted images of doc icons on my desktop on my 24″ alum imac that i noticed after playing a full screen movie. i don’t know if they told you to run a screensaver of JUST white but that is what i did and it ended up removing the ghosted images. it took a couple of times at about 6 hours each. hope this helps. nate

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2807?viewlocale=en_US

February 2nd, 2009 at 6:29 am

2

Jamie Le Souef Says

Hi Nate,

Thanks for your feedback. I did try the white screen option – and whilst it cleared away some of the ghosting, it didn’t get rid of the horizontal and vertical lines unfortunately.

February 2nd, 2009 at 9:09 am

4

Daniel Cheeseman Says

Don’t you just love the Imac! It definetly gets my thumbs up for graphic design and web development but I could never get rid of my PC cause of modern warfare 2! lol ;-)

Nice blog and keep up the good work

February 1st, 2010 at 10:49 pm

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