Chosen Solution
I’m looking for help from anyone who’s worked on the display or display cable for the 15" MacBook Pro (2007 model, Santa Rosa). I want to know how easy it is to check for a bad display cable. About two months ago I began to get the problem where the built-in display begin to flicker and fade to white, sometimes “refreshing” (update the screen, freeze, then fade to white) on a keypress or mouse click or some other update to the screen was made. My guess is that it must be either a bad display or a faulty display cable. The external display works fine, so I ran it in clamshell mode for a while, trying to decide if I wanted to replace the display or just get a new computer. However, after a few weeks, I restarted one day and the built-in display was working fine. I treated it carefully, and it was doing fine up until today, when the problem showed up again. Now I’m leaning more toward it being a display cable problem. If it’s just that, I’ll replace it and keep the computer; a bad screen I’d rather not pay to fix. I’ve opened this one up already to put in a hard drive, but from replacing the CCFL in a PowerBook I know displays can be a real pain to work on. Can someone who’s seen this problem suggest if my hunch is right, and how easy it is to check before I take apart the whole top assembly?
Here’s the guide for replacing the Display Data Cable on your machine. It takes me about two hours: MacBook Pro 15" Core 2 Duo Models A1226 and A1260 Display Data Cable Replacement
