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Today’s comic is, as they say, “inspired by real-life“, with some exaggeration, of course. Throw me some topics you’d like to see in the comments below. No promises, but I’ll see what I can do.
This year, I’m taking part in the 30 Characters challenge. Follow my daily character updates. I’ll have a new character each day from November 1st thru the end of the month.
-Krishna
I’ve been doing some research into video cards and I need to gain some knowledge on the subject from experts like yourselves. I have an ATI Radeon 2600 (256MB) graphics card in my early 2008 Mac Pro. I drive two displays (a 24″ and 19″ display) as part of my setup. I primarily work with tools like Photoshop, Sketchbook Pro, Corel Painter and Maya.
Would it make sense to update the video card to a 1GB ATI Radeon 4870 for a non-gamer like myself? Or is it better to keep what I have? What advantage (if any) would be gained if I sprung for the upgrade? Would I notice any overall improvement in day-to-day OS related tasks in Mac OS X Lion?
Thanks in advance,
-Krishna
Because I’m a nerd, I took some photos of replacing the video card on my Mac Pro. The weird picture problems are still there, and I’ve isolated the problem to my Samsung display. Right now I’m waiting for a replacement to be shipped from Samsung (hopefully within a week).
I was really impressed with how fast Apple sent the replacement card over. I called AppleCare Sunday morning, and by Tuesday morning, I had the card at my doorstep. Say what you will about Apple, but I was really impressed with their service.
Samsung’s customer service was good as well. The lady I spoke with was polite and understood the issue (read: didn’t treat me like an idiot when I explained what was happening). Here’s hoping the new monitor comes soon. (Kudos to both companies for having customer service available on a Sunday morning. I didn’t expect that to be the case when I called…)
Here’s the replacement card:
…here it is installed:
…and another snapshot of the really weird video artifacts I’m still seeing.
-Krishna
Yesterday I posted about the weird video artifacts I was seeing on my display.
On a hunch, I opened the case of my Mac Pro yesterday afternoon. Sure enough, dust was everywhere inside the case, especially on the video card. I gave a few blasts of compressed air to the video card (and surroundings) to clear the dust out. I powered up my Mac. The video artifacts that had plagued my system before were no longer there.
Flash forward 12 hours later, and my machine is still behaving. It would seem that the video problems have gone away. An article on Macworld seemed to confirm the experience.
Moral of the story: I need to clean the inside of the Mac more often.
-Krishna
