Rick's World

Last week, I bought a Mac Pro. I have to say that I truly love that thing! It is so fast! It is the first computer I've had that could keep up to me... When I really get going on a computer, I have so much stuff going on at the same time that most computers can't keep up. This one can. One problem I've been having for the last week though was a cause of some concern for me.

The problem was, At times it didn't seem to be displaying anything on the monitor, even though the monitor was on and the computer was fully booted up. I would turn on the monitor, then turn on the Pro and then wait... and wait... and wait. It seemsed like sometimes it would come up within a good 20 seconds and sometimes it took 5 minutes before I saw anything on the screen. I often wouldn't even see the Apple logo that you usually see when the Mac Pro first boots up. I was getting worried that something was defective.

After much experimenting and consulting with knowlegable friends, I think I've figured out the problem. It seems like at times the Mac Pro has trouble syncing with the monitor... In other words, it can't properly communicate with the monitor. This causes nothing to show up. As best I can figure this is some kind of odd driver bug on the Mac Pro. The solution I found that seems to work is to turn on the monitor first, give the monitor a few seconds to start up, and THEN turn on the Mac Pro. It seems like if you let the monitor fully start up before starting the Mac Pro, that it will work properly. What I had been doing was turning on the monitor first and then immediately turning on the Mac Pro. This seemed to cause the Mac Pro to sync to try to sync to the monitor before the monitor had fully started up. If you give the monitor a few seconds to start up first, it seems to fix the problem. You can also just turn the monitor off for a couple seconds and then turn it back on. This should cause the Mac Pro to resync with the monitor also.

Apple really needs to fix this bug, though.