zsero Posted December 2, 2008 Share Posted December 2, 2008 I have an aluminium iMac 24" on which I use clean XP SP3 via BootCamp with the newest BootCamp drivers. I have built PC's in the past years, but this EFI and BootCamp world is so strange for me, that I really don't know if I am facing software or hardware error. On a PC I would be 100% sure, that it's overheating and/or motherboard/RAM problem, but on a mac, I am not that sure. So the problem is the following: after a while, randomly the screen goes to rainbow color, with 50% opacity where you can barely see what's behind the rainbow overlay, but if you try hard you can move the mouse, with Alt + F4 you can close programs, the whole screen just gets a huge rainbow - overheating-overclocked like artifact. This is an issue since I got the computer, but after restarting it always got back to normal. I tried ATITool overclocking for one hour, but it didn't produce errors after restarting. Like it's happening one hour after I cold-start the computer every morning on about 2-3 days a week. But slowly it went worse and worse. Every day, I got stranger and stranger BSODs, always with some heavyweight XP kernel files, not small driver modules, memory errors, segmentation faults, etc. On a perfectly clean, untouched XP SP3 install, with nothing but Boot Camp 2.1 drivers installed. Now I try to reinstall XP, but I don't really hope it works. I will see what happens for a 48 hour memtest but I didn't have the time to do it. All the programs I use are on XP, and I simply cannot play all day in OS X to test if there is any problem or not. I did an EFI 1.3 update, maybe it helps something. Do you think such rainbow colored display problems (fixing with a restart) and segmentation fault BSOD could be software errors on a clean installed XP SP3 with BootCamp drivers, or I shouldn't even try reinstalling the XP, I should take it for a repair? Actually repair is not such a fun in my country, you have to pay for every part they need to test and sometimes you have to wait up to 2 months, thats why I am upset about taking it for a repair. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
U.C. Posted December 2, 2008 Share Posted December 2, 2008 Always have AppleCare. Sounds like a VRAM Error. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zsero Posted December 2, 2008 Author Share Posted December 2, 2008 How do you test VRAM? Is there such a thing like Memtest86+ for VRAMs? Do you say the only option is to take it to a repair center? Owning a Mac in Eastern Europe is not such a fun as it could be in the USA... I will see what I can do, but it will be a long long time waiting for the repair. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SpeedfreaK Posted December 18, 2008 Share Posted December 18, 2008 try resetting the vram by pressing p and r and alt and command on the startup chime (just google the combination, because i'm not sure of it) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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