Change my Monitor, Change my Life

Technology is a fickle Mistress.

Every time I need to update some bit of tech in my life, it causes a chain reaction with unforseeable consequences. For example, I just acquired a Dell 24 inch widescreen monitor.

The Dell monitor was an inevitable upgrade. I've been using a Samsung Flat screen picture tube for about six years, and even though it still works great, there will come a time when it dies. I would have gladly waited for that date, except that I got the Dell for free.

Yes, I just got a brand new hd monitor for free. Actually, I earned it with productivity/safety points from work, but I won't go into any further detail here. Suffice to say that a free monitor gets the other monitor moved to a shelf.

My new monitor has DVI, VGA and HDMI inputs. So I thought to myself, If it actually ships with a DVI cable, I could hook it up to my Mac with the DVI cable, and hook up my PC with the vga cable.

Upon receiving my monitor, I found out that yes, it actually shipped with a DVI cable. Hooray! I took no time getting it hooked to Mac, and promptly discovered that the DVI does not work between the PowerBook and the Dell.

After bashing my head against the table a while, I remembered a vague story from seven years ago about how the Apple PowerBooks of the time did not work well with DVI on Dell's super big monitors.

That couldn't still be the problem right? Dell fixed that problem, right? Yea, Dell probably did, and Apple probably did too. But Apple had no reason to send me a newer laptop, so I still had the problem from seven years ago.

Well, it's not a complete loss, I thought. I'll just have to use the old VGA connector. Lo and Behold, the VGA connector worked like a charm. Things were looking up as I clicked the buttons on my KVM box to switch to my PC.