Dead Mac Pro!

What a waist of a day, I dislike when technology goes wrong.  It seems lately that technology is failing me.  Unfortunately today it was my MAC pro, which happens to be my main machine.  When I made it to the office nice and early to get some work done I found my machine to be non responsive.  Here is what I did to trouble shoot this problem.

First of all if your MAC is under warranty I suggest just taking it to the store and let them deal with it.  If your MAC is like mine and it's out of warranty you might want to try to diagnose the issue.  Who knows it might be something you can fix.  

Step one the power LED had power but monitor was not responsive, fortunately I had a second monitor so I plugged it in.  Monitor still did not respond, so I held the power button down and turned off the machine.  I tried it one more with a similar result, I ruled out the monitor.  

Step two remove components that where added to the machine by me.  First I removed the memory which was purchased from Crucial and replaced it with the original apple memory.  Cycled the machine and had the same result no response from video.  Before removing the secondary drive that was added a few weeks ago I decided to remove the video card.  

After removing the video card, I cycled the machine and notice the machine was booting.  I heard the normal tones for boot-up, of course nothing to see.  Fortunately I had screen sharing turned on and I was able to log into the machine from my air, nothing like trading 30" for 13" :-(  Just to make sure the video card was the component having an issue I turned off the machine placed the video card back into the machine and powered up.  Same result as the morning, the machine was no longer responsive.

First I went to apple online to see what video card I could get for my machine, they recommend a Radeon HD 1900 XT.  Now with this information on hand the torture started, wouldn't you know it apple does not offer availability at their stores.  Called the closest stores to me and of course they didn't have the video card.  I decided to check the generic route; and unfortunately it was bust.  I ended up in Best Buy which is one of the last electronic stores in my area that actually sells computer parts and no luck.  They didn't have the video cards that people are saying work with the MAC pro (GeForce 8800GT and Quatro FX 5400).  So I bit the bullet when back to the office and spent $400.00 on a new video card which I'm hopping ships today and I should have it hear tomorrow.  

Disappointed:  The one thing that troubles me a bit with this whole thing is; although the new MAC's are intel based, apple chooses to have a proprietary video card in their machines.  While its ok for a phone and not as relevant for a notebook, those of us who get a desktop machine do it to take advantage of customization and expansion of our systems.  If this would of been a windows PC I would of been able to pick up any of the 5 or 6 video boards at the store and be up and running in no time.

I have to say I started seriously using apple when they switched to the intel chipset and unix for OS.  This move allowed apple to benefit from the open source movement and introduced a great number of free applications that were not really possible before.  This combination of software and good hardware has kept me happy for the last five years; but  I always get worried when I run into proprietary components that in the end limit the ability of the user.  On a tangent here, I know apple bought a chip manufacture not too long ago, lets hope they don't start putting proprietary chips on their PCs. 

Oh well tomorrow is already hear, let's hope i get the new card today and hope that it fixes my problems.

Thanks...