07-24-2007, 01:51 AM

I've been renting a MacBook Pro from my college for the last year, and I haven't had any problems with it until tonight. Everything was working fine, when it decided to shut off, due to lack of battery power. Or, at least, that's what I thought it was doing, since the battery had been quite low.

It's hard to describe but, instead of just shutting off and going black, the screen slowly went black with the brightness dying from the outside to the inside. And, I was able to see ghosting of the website I was last on in the screen's LCD pixels, which I've never seen before. But, what really worried was that it seemed like the computer was still on and that I was able to highlight things even when the screen was black.

Moments later, the screen went completely black. I went and hooked it into a plug and proceeded to reboot it. So far, it's working perfectly fine and it's the computer I'm using to post this.

Is there anything wrong with it, or am I just overreacting?

07-24-2007, 05:28 AM

Try using a screen saver. Sometimes when you leave the screen on and idle for awhile the picture becomes frozen beneath the lcd (whatever that means, lol). When moving images is played, such problem should be gone.

07-24-2007, 07:45 AM

could it be that the backlight on your screen is dying
it would explain how your screen slowly fades to black leaving the computer on (even though it looks off) and the "windows" still up a able to use

07-24-2007, 08:51 AM

Isn't a year a bit too soon for the backlight to be dying? Most LCDs last up to 6-8 years.

07-24-2007, 10:38 AM

Sounds like the battery just went out before you got to turning it off. charge it up and turn it on again and see if you see anything wrong..

alfred

07-25-2007, 02:45 AM

I haven't even had it for a full year (I got it at the end of last August,) so I doubt the backlight would be dead yet. But, if the problem occurs again, I may get them to check that. Thanks for the reply about that.

I've since charged it and I was using it while it was charging, without any problems. I'm now using it after it's been charged and it's working fine. Of course, the battery isn't nearly at the end of its charge, so I'll have to see if it does it again the next time it dies.

07-25-2007, 07:22 AM

Sounds like achow got it right! Battery shut itself off before your Shut Down command went through or maybe it just did not have enough juice to follow the command as it was about to shut itself down anyway.

07-27-2007, 06:14 PM

I've had this occur on a Macbook Pro. It turned out that the battery was faulty, so power management was unable to correctly tell when it was running down. For me, it happened with more and more frequency, until the battery icon just showed a red "X" all the time, and it would not hold any charge. Apple replaced it, no questions asked.

Try using a widget like iStat Pro, and looking under the "Battery Health" section. If this number is a low percentage, you may have a dying battery.