[dfriedla]

My hackintosh has been having some strange display issues, and I'm not sure whether I've got screwy software or bad hardware. (My system info is in my signature, and I've installed NBI 0.8.4 RC1.) I have not had any ominous colored lines across my display. Here are some of the symptoms:

• No desktop icons, regardless of what I do to try to make them appear, roughly since Christmas. I can't think of anything drastic that happened to the system around then.
• When I right click on something (a dock icon, for instance), the pop-up menu pops up somewhere else on the screen (say, two inches above the item I clicked).
• Status windows for Finder, unzipping, Disk Utility, etc. are so short as to be invisible--just a few pixels lower than the title bar. I've tried clicking and dragging the corner to try to make it larger, but haven't succeeded. (I'm currently trying to figure out whether this setting is part of a prefs file I can trash.)
• This one's really strange: the photo collage screensaver shrinks to 1/4 its size after each photo comes down. (It's as if my screen is getting exponentially smaller, with growing black space to the top and right of the pictures.) I turned that screensaver off because it was just so weird.
• As I said, no ominous colored lines, but certain things are frequently broken up by gray lines. Camino, for instance, can be hard to read, and scrolling seems to make more of the darned things appear. They don't always go all the way across the screen--sometimes it's restricted to one frame. Sometimes page elements overlap one another significantly, as if the browser isn't rendering the site properly. A block of text will frequently look as though it's suffered an earthquake, too, with the middle four inches nudged a pixel or two above the text on the ends--sometimes mid-letter!
• The 800 x 600 and 640 x 480 resolutions both appear in a kind of vertical letterbox mode, with inch-think black bars on either side of the desktop. 1024 x 600 works normally.

Any ideas? I'm really hoping this is software, because I'd have to put Windows back on to ship the thing to Dell for service (oh, and they'd probably notice the souped-up RAM--that would have to come out, too). I haven't installed any drivers or kexts that aren't part of NBI.

[tiuno]

As you said that's strange but how did you get 2.53 GHz Core 2 Duo on a netbook? There should be a mistake, but if that's your processor I heard sometimes the when the 2 cores are activated I causes some graphical troubleshooting but you can get kext to fix that i think look on OSX86 official wiki there's something for that.

[dfriedla]

...and now I feel like an idiot. I went to About My Mac to get that earlier tonight, because I thought it might be helpful for troubleshooting. As I recall, that's totally false and is linked to the computer thinking my Mini is an MBP.

This is my sheepish face. Fixing that right now!

[tiuno]

probably the fact that you're using the MBP smbios.plist causes graphical troubles I don't know

---------- Post added at 12:13 AM ---------- Previous post was at 12:09 AM ----------

By the way any advice to get the iLife '09?

[dfriedla]

Just a little, important bit: make sure your install disc is working! Mine finally installed after I swapped out for a new disc at the Apple Store.

[dfriedla]

Sorry--I was just looking at this again, and I had another question.

I know my Mini thinks it's an MBP. I know there's a program that makes the "About My Mac" window show the right processor, but I thought that was basically a cosmetic thing. My question is this: since I haven't modified the kexts or really done anything beyond installing NBI, presumably other Minis running NBI think they're MBPs too, right? Wouldn't they have the same plist, without wonky graphics?

At the risk of plagiarizing certain religious rituals, what makes this Mini different from all others?

[tiuno]

Well actually I don't think that your plist is causing troubles, but no if you install Mac OS X on another mini you won't get the MBP plist and the About This Mac just make system profiler to recognize your CPU that's it!

If you still get strange graphics try runing NBI from installer or make a litle partition with windows on it so you'll know if it's a hardware or software issue good luck