Green light of death: another follow-up

The "green light of death" for monitors (see item last time) continued to be a hot topic in MacFixIt's email. Here are the highlights:

Jon Gotow (author of Sleeper) suggests that switching to Sleeper and using Sleeper's Suspend mode, rather than its Off mode, should work-around most wake-from-sleep crashes. Jon adds: "Just make sure to leave Energy Saver installed, but with all of its settings set to 'Never.' Removing Energy Saver doesn't disable monitor power-down, since it's built into the ROMs on PCI PowerMacs."

Ken Takei suggests that reports posted here may represent at least two separate problems, with separate causes. Some wake-from-sleep problems with Studio Displays may be cured by holding the Command-Option-A-V keys at startup or unplugging the monitor briefly. Ken claims the cause is system crashes eventually corrupted the data stored in the monitor. The problem at startup in iMacs (and most of the other similar problems) are hardware related and require a repair. In some cases the repair needed may be to replace the power supply; in other cases it is the deflection (or analog/video) board that needs replacement.

Here's one for the X Files: Matthew Wheeler writes: "I have a client with a 21" Studio Display that just died one day. We gave them a loaner and sent the monitor in to Apple. When it came back I updated the ATI drivers from Apple's web site (most current at the time) and the screen was fine for a couple of weeks. Then the monitor started actually shutting down, showing an amber light. It required pressing the display power switch to shut the display off, and then a restart to get video back. After a while, the user realized than whenever a Sherlock search was made containing the word "card" the screen would go black causing the whole process to be carried out. Weird! We downgraded the video drivers to shipping state and it has been fine since."