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Info and Backstory:

I have a unibody MBP, bought under a year ago, last May. 2.66GHz i7, 8GB RAM, 500GB 7200 RPM Western Digital HDD. RAM and HDD upgraded by me personally maybe 6 months ago.

Scenarios:

At home I plug into a new 27" Cinema Display, and at work I plug into my older 24" Dell LCD. Occasionally, and it has only happened at work so far, my computer will just go black, die, freeze up. It stays powered on, I can heard drive spinning, but have to hard reboot it. Happened, I am pretty positive, once or twice even when not plugged into my display at work.

Questions:

So I am curious if, for example, my Dell monitor is somehow "bad" (which sometimes it randomly goes all static screen and I need to power off/on) could it have borked my MBP? Genius bar ran its 'MRI' test and everything passed, so they told me to have a full diagnosis appointment.

I just dont want to plug my new MBP (when it gets here) into this monitor if there is a chance it could break it, make sense? Any thoughts? Thank you guys!

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Your monitor can't send any inputs to your MBP so I highly doubt it, but I'm not well versed enough on the specifics to tell you if it's absolutely impossible - just seems highly unlikely. I'd say it might be overstressing your hardware, but that your home monitor is larger (and I assume larger/same resolution) makes this seem less likely. Does it get moved around more at work? Hard Drives generally don't take that well. – Phoshi Mar 2 '11 at 21:01
The next time it goes black, hit cmd-F1 once, if you don't get a response, hit it a couple of more times. It may be getting stuck cycling display modes automatically (cmd-f1 cycles them manually). – peelman Mar 3 '11 at 3:36
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2 Answers

up vote 1 down vote

I had a similar issue with my MBP i7 with that static screen that would pop up once in a while.

Is your MBP updated with all the latest system updates and fireware updates? After one of the fireware updates, I stopped having issues. Does it go static on just the external monitor or the internal LCD also?

As for you monitor being able to break your MBP, highly unlikely. Unless you put the monitor on top of the MBP, then you might break it physically.

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Yeah all the latest updates, 10.6.6 – thatryan Mar 2 '11 at 21:20
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up vote 0 down vote

It could be that one monitor is sending a digital signal and the other an analog signal to the video card. I would guess that the analog signal would be on the Dell monitor which is why you're having system issues. As for a solution, there might be some system setting in OSx which tweak in order for the laptop to handle the different video inputs.

Good luck, and hope this helps some.

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