[geeks] The Woes of Mac Pro

[Mark Benson]

Hi,

Firstly a heads up to all Mac users using 10.5.4 on Intel, there would  
appear to be one or more bugs in the NVIDIA OpenGL drivers. I have had  
multiple instances of my Mac Pro (4x 2GHz, 2GB RAM, 4 hard drives,  
GeForce 8800GT) locking solid for a few minutes, the UI screwing up  
then it coming back to life with the GUI totally FUBAR'd. It's got  
flashing lines, stripes, garbage all over. I'm not the only one  
either, there seem to be a lot of folks reporting this on Mac Pro,  
MacBook Pro and iMac running NVIDIA 8x00 series cards/chipsets. Just  
wanted to make y'all aware of that in case it happens to you and you  
panic that maybe you machine is suffering a hardware fault. It's  
probably not. I tried mine in Vista a few days back and sat playing  
Mass Effect for a good hour and had no kickback in Windows. Roll-on  
10.5.5 and a fix, hopefully...

Second, recently I moved my desk around and had to take all my stuff  
off. I took the opportunity to get the canned air out and blow the  
dust out of the Mac Pro. While doing so I pulled the RAM boards out to  
blow them off and clear the rear/lower fan assy. of dust. I plugged  
them back in again and thought nothing ore of it, until I opened  
Activity Monitor and noticed I suddenly only had 1024MB of RAM. I  
shutdown and reseated the boards and all is well. Why am I telling you  
this? Well the boards *seemed* to be seated (I checked whn I put them  
back initially, I know I did) and they were not. Again, just a heads  
up incase any fellow Mac Pro users have any woes.

Okay I'm done :P


-- 
Mark Benson

My Blog:
<http://markbenson.org/blog>
Visit my Homepage: <http://homepage.mac.com/markbenson>

"Never send a human to do a machine's job..."