Soundcard buzzing, LCD lost brightness and flickering

[rutto]

I name myself as most unlucky Pandora user out there so far.


Here's a new chapter of my unlucky love-story with the Panda


(copy-pasted from the mail I sent to ED's shop)


[...]


I'm here to report new troubles with my (otherwise awesome) Pandora.


- I got it back on Friday, KUDOS for the the quick fixing.


- Then I was stuck with it the whole day due to the reset / "Please


Select The Date" bug. I didn't have time at work, and no Internet at


home, so I had no idea how to work around the problem.


- Finally made it working on Saturday, I played around and enjoyed


it for a few hours, then something terrible happened.


- I was running from battery, some music playing (external


loudspeakers plugged in the line-out), then put it in standby (power


button pressed shorty).


- I attached the power-cable and resume it (or did it turn on


automatically?? It actually turns on every time I plug the battery or


the cable, not sure if it's intended but it's rather annoying).


- After something like 2 minutes of total unresponsiveness (is it


THAT slow at resuming from a standby?) the music started playing


again, then buzzing, frigging, crying out loud, then stopped. And the


LCD got much much darker, less gamma, less contrast.


- Audio doesn't work anymore, just a low buzz can be heard whenever


I try to play something and, while doing do, the whole screen slightly


flickers.


- The Pandora itself is still usable but looking really bad. The


gamma and brightness tool of course didn't impove the situation.


- Resetting the device didn't help.


- The brightness problem is also noticeable during the boot process


but doesn't seem to affect the pre-boot screen.


What could, should, would I do now?


Please give me some feedback, in the mean time I won't touch the Pandora again.


Thanks again, let me know what I can do.


[...]


OK, the naive question is: anyone else experienced the same? Since a re-flash didn't fix it I fear the audio / graphic cards just fried out more or less spontaneously.


Pfff...

 

[tsh]

Sounds like it might be the LCD problem, but if you make your description less prosaic, it would be clearer to diagnose. Fixed problems and irritations just distract from your description of the problems.

 

[A Deaf Bat]

I didn't see this mentioned, but did you try taking out the battery and putting it back in?


What happens when moving the hinge, does the screen flicker? You said you had external speakers plugged into the line-out, right? That's a headphone port, not a line-out although you *could* use it for either depending on what you plug into it. The speakers you had plugged in, were they powered speakers or no?


That's all I got...

 

[WizardStan]

Did you solve the date problem by removing the battery, or did you update to HF4? Basically I want to know if you're on HF4 or H3. If you're on HF3, then opening the lid causes the screen to turn on but it doesn't actually come out of low power mode: the CPU is still clocked all the way down to 14Mhz. That would explain the unresponsiveness. If the sound chip is buffered (I don't know if it is), then it would also explain the sudden buzzing: it took a couple minutes for the extremely slow CPU to buffer up some audio, start it playing, then the buffer ran out and you've got garbage.


I'm hoping you may have just put your Pandora into a weird state. Someone else reported they had issues with their video being all weird after a crash and couldn't recover even after rebooting; pulling the battery for a few minutes did something to fix it. You may have similar luck.


If pulling the battery doesn't work, and reflashing the firmware doesn't work, then you may have encountered some really weird hardware glitch and you need to send it back with a note detailing exactly everything you did for RMA.

 

[tsh]

It would be good to work out what the problem is before RMAing. Saves on postage if the problem is easy to fix.

 

[EvilDragon]

Hm, sounds like power troubles to me, but I also got a few questions:


* You said you just got it back from fixing. The latest Pandoras I fixed simply got a new LCD cable - I didn't change the board nor the LCD. So... did it work before? Or did you get it back from Craig?


EDIT: Ah, just saw your mail. You were the one who got a half-finished Pandora first. You got the same one back, as it was no fix, just putting in the missing screws. I did run the normal testings though... but as you explained, it seemed to have happened after a while...


* It would also be interesting what OS you have installed. The older ones have problems with standbye mode, HF4-B4 has fixed that.


* What power adaptor did you use? The one you got with it? USB? Did you remove or reinsert the battery while the adaptor was plugged in?


* Is the sound buzzing / brightness problem there after you removed the battery and the power cable for at least 10 minutes? Is it there when you boot from battery-only?

 

[rutto]

I already tried everything mentioned above; no luck.


I only used the provided power supply to charge the battery once, and never actually plugged any USB device.


The external loudspeakers I was using were the Creative T-20; so yes, powered.


Even keeping the power sources unplugged for several minutes and flashing the latest HF4 didn't improve the situation.


The screen is so dark it's difficult to even read the TTY output during the flashing process.


Screen flickers more if the volume-wheel is set to a higher output. Bzzzzzzzzzz


Anything else, people?


Thanks for the feedback so far

 

[EvilDragon]

Damn. Sounds like there something broke the audio part here... Guess there's no other way than to ship it back again


I'm really sorry.


If you want, I can make a test run of the next unit for a few hours... it looks like it broke just shortly after you used it.