Okay so I have a Macbook Pro which I use to take to weddings, edit in lightroom,use for email, showit etc. I still have a few PC's, one is used as a video editing machine and has Premiere pro and CS3 photoshop on. There are a couple of other programs on there which are PC based only. So, the last few weeks the PC has been acting up. I decided to add a new bigger primary hard drive. I used Acronis to clone the disk exactly as per instructions... after 5-or 6 attempts I still couldn't get the new (cloned) disk to be recognised as the new primary, (jumpers checked, everything checked, and then double checked again by a computer geek/whizz. I eventually put it back together as was and then found a couple of discs were corrupted, the Matrox RTX100 video card kept crashing (has done for months), so eventually after wasted days we decided to get a MacPro and use Parallels for the windows programs I have.
Picked up a brand new one on ~thursday, installed Parallels, but for some reason it was struggling to install Parallel tools! Got it working but not 100% happy as the coherence button wouldn't work. Usual latest upgrades downloaded & installed to no avail.
The Mac side would work fine though.
Got up this morning, (Mac was in sleep mode) moved the mouse and when the monitors woke up the resolution & colours were ridiculous. A lot of the text is unreadable. So I rang the Mac store (no tech support working) but the guy who answered suggested a P-R reset, to no avail, when I booted up from the start disk the screen looks fine, spoke to another Mac whizz, tried other reset modes, still no good.
I am now re-installing the operating system from the original discs while I type this on my macbook pro.

I can't believe what's happening, i've never had a problem with the Macbook pro and after reading about how good the MacPro is took the plunge. I'm now starting to wonder!!!!

Sorry for the long winded post, but i've got to get this out of my system.


Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

My hubby is an Apple Solutions Consultant, so I read that to him, and here is what he suggested:

When you go in Coherence Mode, it's using an emulated video driver, so you are not getting the full power of the video card. You should definitely use Boot Camp on it for your video editing or anything requiring a decent amount of power. If there is a way, he hasn't been able to figure it out-- he wanted to play a pretty power-intensive video game in Parallels on his Mac Pro, but had to settle for Boot Camp.

Thanks Lindsey, re the other problem re screen res/colours, I have just reinstalled te operating system, when it boots up everything looks okay and then within a couple of seconds it reverts back to the bad res/colours. Any suggestions.

Thanks, Carl

so you put windows on a mac and now you're wondering why it's messed up? lol

Well don't know whats happening here, plugged in another monitor, again, then went back to original monitor, but this time turn off the power, guess what, perfect picture.

It's a strange one but appears to be working okay.

Just got to get Parallels & Boot camp sorted.

LOL.




Glad you got it sorted out, and sorry I didn't come back to check earlier.

If you haven't already installed Boot Camp/Parallels, you should install Boot Camp first because once you install Parallels, instead of trying to create its own segment on the hard drive, it can use your boot camp partition, which means you can drag and drop files between your partitions as well, which makes it way cooler

Thanks again for the advice Lindsey, I think i'm going to uninstal Parallels, instal Boot camp and the put Parallels back on as per your advice.

UPDATE: I had the display working fine all day yesterday, shut it down last night, just switched it on again and got the problem again. I pulled out the plug for monitor 1 without turning off the power and plugged it back in and it's working fine again now, seems like it might be a video card problem. I think I will take it back to the shop tomorrow and let them check the card, unless you have any suggestions.

Carl

He says if you did a full format and reinstall and are having the issues, he'd have the video card looked at.

If you only did an archive/install, it could have not fixed the software problem.


Sorry you're having the issue. I promise the Mac Pro is amazing, lol!
I remember when we first got ours, I had this action in a pack I had never used cause it said it would take like 10+ minutes and I didn't want to bother. So I installed and pressed play and .... 2 minutes later? less? I was so happy, lol.


-Lindsey

yeah, the mac pro is amazing... without windows. i'm still not sure why people don't understand why they're having problems with their macs... but they're running windows haha. it just causes so many more problems than its worth... keep your macs dedicated to OSX and don't waste your time.

The problems not with running windows, the problem is the display output unless I unplug & plug the monitors back in while they're switched on!

Hey Carl! Sorry to hear about your troubles. You know me, I am a Mac fan, all I use it Macs...I hate Windows!

However, Mac's do weird things sometimes and I still don't understand what happens. Currently, our Mac servers are running really slow and I mean slow. We have uninstalled the operating system and have installed Leopard and we are seeing if the new HD and system helps.

I will Skype you later.

Well I finally sorted the problem.

NOW I LOVE MY MAC !!!!!

How stupid a thing it was, it was a contrast setting issue which is hidden in a tab in the system preference file. All reset to normal now, and just edited 3500 images from a wedding last week and edited a full wedding video, all within the week. SO much faster now i've not got a crashing PC, i've added a couple of 1 TB hd's and another 500GB, also hooked up a DROBO with Time machine, so hopefully data should be safe!

One small problem with my Macbook Pro, it no longer reads blank DVD discs, just spits them out. I've checked in the system preferences, against another one and it says in media type CD only, where it should say something about all media (can't remember the wording). Does anyone know how to reset the settings back. This is defo software related.

Carl