Intermittent white flashing lines on my MacBook Air

April 29, 2017 1:26 PM

In January of 2017, I bought a refurbished 11-inch Macbook Air from Apple. Lately, I have noticed intermittent flashing white lines on the screen, even when I am connected to an external monitor. I was able to capture it in this video this afternoon. Any idea what is going on?

Thanks, as always, for your help.

posted by 4ster to Computers & Internet (10 answers total)

Looks to me like hardware (bad / overheating Video chips?) - I'd make a fresh backup of everything important, and shoot over to the Apple Store. You should be under warranty.
posted by jenkinsEar at 1:35 PM on April 29, 2017 [3 favorites]

Is it across the desktop or just in video playback windows? If it's the latter then it may be video driver problem. If updating the driver(s) doesn't fix it then it's likely a hardware problem.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 2:40 PM on April 29, 2017 [1 favorite]

That definitely looks like a problem with the graphics card, probably hardware but possibly software. It sort of looks like in the video the problem is only in the video playback window, which suggests it might be the hardware decoder for video. Does it happen in other programs? Only video playback?
posted by Nelson at 2:45 PM on April 29, 2017

Response by poster: Hi everyone. Thank you for helping. This issue happens on the screen whether or not I am playing videos.
posted by 4ster at 2:47 PM on April 29, 2017

I had a MacBook Pro with a similar problem after a fall, and I was able to solve it it by opening it up and re-seating the ribbon cable that connects at the hinge.

I suspect it is much harder to open the Air but if you can I'd try that for free before paying anyone. (Also yes, full backups yesterday if you don't already have them)
posted by SaltySalticid at 2:52 PM on April 29, 2017

Does it happen on the external monitor too? If just built in screen, ribbon cable as mentioned previously is possible, if on ext monitor too, I'd suspect the gfx chip :(
posted by TheAdamist at 4:49 PM on April 29, 2017

Response by poster: Yeah, it's on the external monitor too.
posted by 4ster at 5:32 PM on April 29, 2017

Don't open the computer. If you bought it refurbished from Apple in January, it should be under the limited warranty. Make a Genius Bar appointment, or if there isn't one nearby, call AppleCare.
posted by bluloo at 7:46 PM on April 29, 2017

Refurbished computers (if purchased from Apple) are covered under the standard one year warranty. Absolutely do not open it until you've at least had it looked at in an Apple Store.
posted by sixfootaxolotl at 8:02 PM on April 29, 2017

For what it's worth, even once it's out of warranty, the apple store is really good about doing diagnostics and simple fixes (cleaning out dust, etc) at no cost, so I've always found it a helpful first step for any weirdness - even when I had one hard-to-diagnose issue which took four visits and three laptop dropoffs to actually fix, I didn't pay a penny until I was actually paying for parts (and that was on an out-of-warranty computer).
posted by R a c h e l at 10:29 AM on May 1, 2017