VIDEO - Mini Mac (new 1.83) only displays 256 colours

[jah457]

I am new to Macs, and on Day Two my screen (HP 2105) went to a 16 or less colour configuration by itself. The only way I can get any reasonale visibility on the screen is to set the colour depth to 256 which looks normal. Thousand and Millions is terrible.

I tried another monitor, same thing. Restarted, same thing. Ran the ColorSyncUtility and found that there aren't any Profiles in either the Devices or Profiles Tabs. I ran the Scan, and the Repair options without sucess.

Seems like the video driver/color profile is corrupt, or possibly the video memory.

Any suggestions how to troubleshoot further?

UPDATE: When restarting from a cold start, the display "temporarily" displays the full resoolution of 1680 x 1050 (which the monitor does support), then it flips back to 1280 x 1024 at 8-bit color.

UPDATE 2: I switched back over to a VGA cable with the DVI to VGA adapter and everything is running properly. I guess I narrowed it down to the cable, or the DVI Video driver.

UPDATE 3: The VGA cabled solution also did it. I went back to the DVI cable and it has been working for a day now. I guess it needs to go back for analysis in the Apple Repair shop to see if the Video Card, Driver, or memory is bad.

Any help would be appreciated.


Thx
John

 

[Kees Buijs]

There is communication between the computer and the display. Apparently for some reason this was not working properly, thus the mac expected a monitor with less options as it had, thus reducing some settings.

Changing cables triggered the renewal of the configuration data thus now the mac know what the display can do and will allow you to use the allowed modes.

This doesnot look like a hardware problem, more like a bad cable (still hardware, but not the computer). Having it check is an issurance but not likely to show up any problems.


Good luck, Kees