macnightmare
I suppose it was bound to happen, call it karma... I've razzed a lot of friends whose PC's have blown up or had problems lately. "One word: 'get a Mac'," I've been known to say. Oops.
A little over a week ago I decided it was time to take a huge plunge and invest in the 30" Display. It bordered on excessive, but I had one at Fine Living and had found it so much easier to work on, and my old 17" display just wasn't cutting it anymore as I began to do more and more of my work from my home office. Not only that, but to power the new monitor, I was going to have to get a new graphics card. After a lot of confusing research online, I finally settled on the ATI x800 xt - one of the most expensive options, but it came highly recommended and if I was going to sink this much into things, I needed something reliable and trouble-free. I'm about as un-tech as they get.
To my glee, both arrived last Thursday. It took a few hours for me to set up (did I mention that I'm very un-tech?) The grx card came with an instruction book for a different card - that didnt help. Especially when the directions were "remove the old card. Insert the new card in its place." Gee, thats helpful. Nevertheless, I figured it out, and was pretty proud of myself. Life was good.
Monday morning, these odd pixels appeared. Light blue and pink all over the screen. Dragging a window across them would make them 'collect' and multiply. I stayed up til 4am reading message boards, discovering this seemed to be a common problem with 30inch displays for a couple years that Apple has never found a way to address. Most board posters had one odd solution or another that made them go away for a while - none of those worked for me. The only hope would be to try to exchange it and hope for one without the problems. Great. Then at one point today, I plugged my old monitor in as well. Now both are covered in the offending pixels. So now I wonder if it isnt the graphics card. That doesnt make sense with the info on Apples discussion boards, but who knows. It looks like this is going to take weeks or months to fix. Somehow when you spend this kind of money, you expect things to work. And I suppose its even harder when you've become used to working on a troublefree intuitive computer system for years... I guess I had it coming.
And by the way, Apple slashed the prices for their monitors on Monday, reducing them all at least $500. Never fails.