MacBook Pro Problem at Start

Hellos and Saluations,

Lads and gents: I first want to say what a brilliant board you all have here. Congrats to the admins and mods for a splendid job!

My new friends, I have a MacBook Pro that I purchased a little over 1 year ago. I'm still running Tiger. About 2 weeks ago, upon opening the book, I started getting a gray screen that would stay there for a few seconds, then allowing me to start working. Fast forward to 3 evenings ago. The same thing happened, but it got stuck on the gray screen. The next morning it had the same symptoms, but eventually after messing with the mouse pad it came back on. Unfortunately, today it's doing the same thing, and it's stuck on gray.

Being a noob to this forum doesn't make me a board noob in general. I did some searches on this and have tried a number of things from other thread suggestions.

Things I've tried:

A. At start up, holding the Option, Apple, P, R buttons.
B. At start up, holding the Shift button
C. At start up, holding the C button (this produced an audible sound only)
D. There is no Apple icon on the screen, just gray/blue
E. There is no spinning wheel of death
F. I haven't spilled any liquid on it, nor dropped it

I do not have the original OSX install CD any longer to my knowledge but will look for it once I return home from work today.

Please, if anyone can help, I will be in much gratitude. As a first time Mac/Apple owner, I would really like to not have this be catastrophic..

Again, props on the board lads and germs!

Darrren

Ok, I'm after doing some more research, I decided to "Reset the PowerBook and iBook Power Management Unit:

Resetting PowerBook and iBook Power Management Unit (PMU)

I only did step 1 of:

For most situations, a restart is sufficient. If the computer has stopped responding, try these steps, in order, until the computer responds:

1. Force Quit (Option-Command-Escape)
2. Restart (Control-Command-Power)
3. Force Shut Down (press the power button for 10 seconds)

Nothing happened after doing step 1, so I closed the book, as I was going to take the battery out. However, I realized that I hadn't turned off the computer yet, so I opened the book back open -- only to find that the screen was off of the gray and was asking me if I wanted to Force Quit. I selected not to.

Anyone have any suggestions on what I should do now? Lol, the computer is working now, but for how long... and I'm sure that I didn't remedy the issue yet.

Thanks!

Darren(is probably the only one reading this thread but what the ****..lol);D

Nope I read it....from my 24 hours experience you will find some helpful advice and if like me, your persevere, you will find your own working solution and post the result to help others lol **** ** ** ***

who doesn't like an asterick now and again ^^

^^ Right on!

Update:

I took the computer to the Apple store. They ran a stress test and tried to replicate the issue, but couldn't. I was advised that they determined the issue to not be hardware/hard drive related; but that the problem was most likely software based. At this time I took the opportunity to upgrade to Leopard. For a little over a week the book was good to go -- no issues at start up. However, last night, when I returned home from work the issue reared it's ugly head again. After a couple attempts at hard shut downs I gave up. This morning, same thing except that it eventually came back on...

This is very frustrating (obviously). I'm not sure what route to take at this time.

Does anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks again to anyone who is reading/responding. Please help!

Thanks in advance,
Darren

Hellos,

Okey... so... the MacBook Pro has been on the gray/bluish/greenish screen for close to 24 hours now. I've tried re-booting several times now; pulling the battery then restarting, restarting in safe mode, letting the battery go completely dead then powering up after plugging it in, etc. NOTHING works...

This really fails. The book is only 14 months old and only used for a couple of hours/day. The "genius" at the Apple store advised me that this issue isn't hardware related, but I'm beginning to think that it's a video card issue, which, if I'm not mistaken, is incorporated into the motherboard -- making it a hardware issue. I'm gonna be hells ****** if they tell me it's the video card or the screen. Both will be stoopid expensive and, after only 14 months of light use, very very disappointing to their quality. I'm still holding out hope, but if it's catastrophic and therefore expensive, I will be creating such a plethora of threads on a massive amount of national and international forums that will all be forwarded to Apple in such a manner that they will be forced to take note.....

This sucks.

Darren(typing on a 4 year old Windows based P.C. right now..)

Edit: Just realized that the word "p!ssed" is censored. Lol.

TTT!

Someone please help. Is there nobody with a suggestion?

Seriously, there's only been 1 reply to this thread, and this is a Mac forum!

Darren(becoming jaded very quickly)

So yea. Just returned from the Apple store. They've deduced that the culprit to this issue is my video card. Whilst they were diagnosing the problem, I let the genius know that this is my first Mac product; that I run an international mail order business with 45 windows based pc's; that this book was somewhat of a trial to determine whether or not we would switch to Mac for our network; that we have a deal with Dell on the table to provide us with all new Dell computers; and finally that, given this catastrophic qc failure, we would more than likely be going with Dell (depending on if Apple was going to take care of me on this or not).

Apparently this got through to the genius, as he advised me that, given the book was only 1 month out of warranty, they would be replacing the motherboard pro-bono. This was greatly appreciated by me (and my company) and we will be in talks with Apple to have them provide us with our new network. This whole ordeal, while somewhat insignificant to the overall day-to-day issues of my life, still had me rather concerned about the quality control, and especially customer service of Apple/Mac. I have a new found positive outlook on their service at this time and will report my dealings on all of the international forums that my company is a prominent member/vendor on.

Last, while it appears that the participating audience in this thread is limited to myself and only one other member (who's tenure on this board is a freshman like mine...), I will continue to update this as it still offers to add to the comprehensive knowledge base of MacBook issues and Apple customer service.

Darren