this person is selling a mac book pro 4 425 with this when i power it up, the led light on top of the power supply input just flickers dim green. but i powered up the battery with another laptop and it still starts up with the fan at high speed and a black screen is this worth fixing??
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Unfortunately, I have to take a guess here on what machine you have. Based on the age of the question, I am going to assume you have a 2007-2008 era machine with the 8600M GT GPU. I had the 17" 2007 and it kept failing, so Apple had to replace it. The final diagnosis was a bad GPU.
The problem with these machines is the GPU's are known to fail in them because of a factory chip defect of the nVidia supplied parts. Some machines didn't fail early, but most of them did. The problem now is the early survivors are ticking time bombs with troublesome graphics cards that are statistically more likely to fail then they were when the machines were still somewhat relevant. Back in 2007, Apple recalled these machines and offered a repair extension, which you can read about here.
The problem now is that these machines are old enough Apple no longer supports or repairs these computers anywhere (including California). What this essentially means is once the machine fails, you're on your own.
Since these machines are so old, finding a board that has never been repaired (reflowed or reballed) is next to impossible. These boards should be avoided, since these repairs only patch the problem and don't offer a permanent fix. The problem will always come back and you will be at square one again and have to keep fixing the machine when the GPU keeps failing. At this point, move the hard drive to another Mac that supports the version of OS X yours ran when it failed and copy your data to an external hard drive and replace it with a new Mac.
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nick - read the link you first gave to see what machines are affected. BTW I called Apple two days ago on a MBP 2.5 with the issue, they had a box to me early yesterday. I got an email this morning that they got it, it's fixed and will be FedExed this morning. Should have it back in the morning. So they're still fixing them for free and at record speed. They even give you a link to a site that shows its progress.
Nick - it was only the GeForce 8600M GT GPU. Not all of these were defective. If your MBP never failed, it was not affected.
why were you drowning your cat in the sink? did it die?
Did your old laptop die? Cat hair is not covered by AppleCare, you have to get KittyCare for the cat.
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see if you can get a history of the machine so you have some idea of what the problem might be.
by mayer