Friday, October 02, 2009

Snow Leopard Black Screen Disease Cure (Maybe)

So far it's looking good. My computer is hooked up with the adapter cord and I don't touch the keyboard for five minutes and the screen doesn't go black. If you can't wait to find out what it is you can skip down to the solution at the bottom.

In hindsight it's 'obvious' but as previous posts show, I've been in contact with an Apple Help expert for over two weeks, we've tried all sorts of things, and nothing solved the problem, including a new power cord.

But two hours with an Apple Genius (I think using that word as a job title tends to diminish the word itself) named Hannah, and it appears we solved the problem. That two hours doesn't count the hour it took for them to see me when, for some reason, my appointment was lost. Fortunately, David who made my appointment yesterday was there and confirmed I had a 6pm appointment. David's sitting in the blue t-shirt on the left.





There was one more clue that emerged tonight. Up til now I haven't actually timed how long it took for the screen to go black. I knew it was around five minutes. But since we kept doing things and then turning off the computer and then waiting to see if it went black again, I was timing it over and over and it was always exactly five minutes after I stopped touching the keyboard.



They finally connected me with Hannah who tried a few things. One thing she did to see if it was my hard drive or something in the software I had on my hard drive, was load Snow Leopard from a separate hard drive onto my computer to see whether it would still shut down. At this point I don't remember what happened. I think it still shut down, but I'm not certain.

She set up a test identity to see if we logged on as another user. It didn't have the problem as the other user.

Then she checked for applications that loaded when I - as the user - turned on my computer. She took them out of the startup. That didn't fix it.

She did some other stuff with other things plugged into the computer.

I wondered why it was always five minutes. And she said, "hmmmm, what is set to happen in five minutes?" She checked my screen saver. That was set for five minutes and when she tried to change it the round rainbow came on and the screen locked.

THE SOLUTION

I had as my screensaver a slide show set up in an older iPhoto, maybe iPhoto 06 or 08. It was set to start in five minutes after I didn't touch the keyboard. She took one of the generic Apple screensavers and set it up instead. After five minutes instead of going black, it went to the screensaver and I could still use the computer.

Why Snow Leopard can't handle this old iPhoto slide show screensaver I don't know nor does Hannah. But once we turned it off and put on another screensaver, it stopped going to black.

But why only when the power adapter cord was on? We went into the sleep preferences. I had changed to sleep preference for the power adapter to an hour after it came back from the MacHaus and they'd both been reset for one minute. (I'm not exactly sure what I did at this time, but I know at some point I put it at an hour hoping that would stop it, but it didn't.) At that time we thought it was related to going to sleep. I didn't want it to go to sleep for longer so it wouldn't shut down. But I hadn't changed it for battery so it still went to sleep in one minute. So it would go to sleep before the screensaver was set to go on (which was five minutes.)

As I say, in hindsight the answer was 'obvious.'

This doesn't guarantee that the rest of you getting here searching "Snow Leopard Black Screen" or "Snow Leopard Blank Screen" (between 10 and 20 people a day) have exactly the same problem. Something in Snow Leopard is getting screwed up - on my computer - with something on the old iPhoto slideshow I was using as a screen saver. So if you have an old iPhoto slideshow for a screensaver, I'd change that first thing. If you don't have an old slide show as a screensaver, is there some possibility it is related to an old slide show or just even to an old photo shop picture coming up?

So far I've tested this about three times and it's worked fine. It never worked fine before this. One good part of this for others with the problem is that the software that is messing it up for me is an Apple product - iPhoto. So it is Apple's responsibility to figure out why this is happening and fix it. Not some other company's responsibility.

Good luck. And if this turns out to be your problem too, leave a comment.

11 comments:

  1. Nothing like the time-saving convenience of a computer, eh? Congratulations, anyway. I think I would have stripped Leopard and reinstalled panther... as someone who doesn't have Apple Care.

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  2. Our US English teacher has the same Lap top which is in the 2nd picture. It had the same apple like logo. My friend said it costs a lot (approximately half year wage of an average Hungarian without any other expenditures).

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  3. What a relief!! Thank you Hannah!!
    And you're right... the answer was (sort of) obvious. I love it when people can solve problems like that. Happy Birthday to J. ... thinking of you down there... say hello to the ocean for me... cs

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  4. Ropi, a little white MacBook costs about $1000 these days.

    CS, J and the ocean say hi back.

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  5. Thank you! I woke up to this this morning.

    There's a lot of hullaballo about many screen savers no longer being compatible with Snow Leopard... I should have known. Mine was set to 'random.'

    Anyway, thanks again!

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  6. Thanks that solved my issue as well.

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  7. I had no screensaver on (set to 'Never', with Flurry selected), so it wasn't the cause. However, it was the solution: By using another laptop to screen-share, and clicking "Test" on one of the screensavers, the screensaver showed up on the previously blank-screen of my Macbook Pro. Then, I moved the cursor to exit the screensaver and everything was restored. Ahh, Apple...

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  8. Another scenario where you get a blank screen after waking works like this:

    1. While machine is running with external display, put it to sleep by unplugging the power adapter.
    2. Wake the machine up via plugging in display and power adapters
    3. Screen is blank, with pointer displayed.

    What I've found works for me when this happens on my 13" MacBook Pro is just typing my password and hitting 'enter.'

    That's because what's happening is that the login prompt is displaying on a part of the screen that's not on screen.

    https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3868811

    This has been happening to me off and on (seemed to go away after one particular update, came back with the next) since I started using this machine 16 months ago. I just recently figured out this workaround. So, try it.

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    Replies
    1. > What I've found works for me when this happens on my 13" MacBook Pro is just typing my password and hitting 'enter.'

      Oh my gosh! This was what happened on my iMac, with a connected external monitor, and a password-lock.

      I had to hit c/r once or twice to put the invisible cursor into the invisible password box.

      This solution would never have occurred to me. Thank you Steve for hosting this page, it turns out to be highly ranked for 'snow leopard black screen'; and thank you escoles for adding that comment. :)

      Delete
  9. Daniel Allen, wow, three years later and people are still having problems. Thanks Apple for not taking care of this.

    ReplyDelete

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