Chosen Solution
My late 2011 MBP has recently started giving issues with the display. What I’ve found is much along the lines of previously reported issues with Macbooks: there are green pixels where the display is rendering “shading”. This only happens on the laptop display and intermittently. I’ve installed gfxCardStatus and it only occurs with the Discrete card and only on the laptop display, I frequently connect an external display when working at my desk. I’d like to know if this is repairable, there doesn’t appear to be any display parts on iFixit and from the other questions and answers, it’s not clear what the fault it. As I type this, the issue isn’t presenting itself, however when I was using it this weekend (while disconnected from the external display) whenever I used Chrome it would start flickering (presumably because of the reliance on the AMD GPU). If this continues and worsens, is it likely that my external display will stop working or would it be limited to the Macbook screen? Any answers and suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
It usually worsens into a certain color that runs along the whole screen straight away on boot up and then hangs on the apple logo making the MacBook not able to boot. It’s the GPU failing on the 2011 17” A1286, a common fault but can be fixed using various methods: http://dosdude1.com/resources.html The second option on that link is the easiest out of all of them, not a permanent fix but does the job.
At this point you don’t have much to lose. Here’s DosDudes solution for turning off the dedicated graphics. I have had success (limited) on machines where gfxcardstatus failed http://dosdude1.com/gpudisable/ This failing, I have also had success using a hot air workstation and reflowing the GPU.
