February 26th, 2007

So for the first time in years I bought myself an Apple computer. I’ve used every conceivable piece of computer hardware over the years, bar punch cards. Mac’s have been something I used to use a fair bit, but for various reasons… Flash compatibility mainly, I tended to use PC hardware.

My living room entertainment system is a Windows Media Center PC, the laptop is a Vaio and it’s about time for a general upgrade.

I’d been toying with the idea of swapping it all out with a Mac Mini and a MacBook Pro. This is largely due to the Intel switch, Bootcamp and Parallels.

So stage 1, I bought myself a decent Mac Mini and a 1Tb drive to house copious amounts of media.

After getting it home I got OS X setup using a 19in LCD, and then hooked it up to the livingroom LCD screen, a Lexsor 32in LCD (LC-32M5S) and everything seemed to be cool. Then the big job of copying 600gb of music and video began and so I switched back to the 19in and setup shop on a table out the way so that I could happily use the Media Center PC while all the new software and media got setup on the Mac.

That took a couple of days, Windows XP running on Paralells outperformed my Media Center PC so generally, I was very happy. I had a few video playback problems, VideoLan (VLC) fell over playing a few DivX/Xvid encoded videos but hey, no big whoop…

I also got an EyeTv USB TV Tuner and that turned out to be very sweet too…

All in all I was super pleased… and after the big migration of media I was all set to swap out the old PC and sort out that whole TV corner with the dinky little mac mini.

And then the problems began, or rather problem. Quite a major one too, but hopefully not terminal… You see, when I hooked the Mac Mini back up to the Lexsor LCD it wouldn’t display video.

This has had me stumped for about 4 hours now and it’s not very funny. If I plug the VGA cable from the Mac into the 19in LCD everything works ok still, but when I plug it into the Lexsor up comes the display for a fraction of a second and then it disappears… D-Sub No Signal 60Hz… Bah!

Having tried DisplayConfigX and SwitchResX (to no avail) I’m getting that troubleshooting fatigue where desperate (and most likely futile) measures are fleeting across my mind… I don’t like that. Method ges flying out the window and I find myself trying the same thing over and over… What makes it worse is the tease of the display appearing… then disappearing… (repeat) it’s mighty frustrating stuff.

If only it had failed last week, when I first plugged the Mac mini into the Lexsor… I would of just popped out and bought a new LCD, expensive but not so mentally challenging, but now I’m left with this nagging feeling (and distinct knowledge) that there is some very simple solution to this problem… and the kick in the knickers is not knowing what it is. Well not yet at least!

And so the search continues… one venting of spleen 100% complete

One Mac Mini and Lexsor display to get talking nicely… 0% complete