I bought this swanky new Dell 20″ LCD monitor a month ago. When I first got it, I plugged it in to the DVI port on my PowerMac G4 and it worked like magic. It was so clear and large at 1600 x 1200. Then I rebooted for whatever reason and I noticed that my resolution had dropped to 1280 x 1024, which doesn’t look great since it’s a non-native resolution. Worse, the monitor preference panel wouldn’t allow to me select any other resolution or bit depth.

I searched around the web and found a couple of solutions on MacOSXHints. One was to try the SwitchRes X utility. This didn’t seem to work at all. I had no options for changing the resolution. Maybe this only works with analog monitors. DVI is too smart for its own good. The other solution was really simple – turn the monitor off when you reboot. The machine won’t know what to use as the default resolution, so it will will just give you all the standard options. It turns out that this is what happened when I first installed the monitor since I didn’t turn off the machine; I just plugged it in. If I hadn’t done that, I’d probably still be scratching my head trying to figure out how to get the thing to run at 1600 x 1200.

It didn’t seem to matter if I turned off the monitor or not. The only thing that worked was to physically unplug the monitor cable from the back of the machine which involves a lot of fumbling around in an area I can’t reach very well.

I thought I would see if OS 9 would work better. I switched the boot to OS 9 and rebooted. It’s so long since I’ve seen OS 9. I can’t even remember the last time I had to start Classic mode. Well, part-way into the OS 9 boot, my monitor showed a lot of horizontal lines and got stuck. I hit the reset button to restart. It bonged and started up, then rebooted itself again, which is usually what it does after it decides to reset the PRAM. Then it started up again and uh oh – blinking question mark. It can’t find anything to boot from.

After restarting a few more times and trying to start with the ‘x’ key down and intentionally reseting the PRAM, it still wouldn’t boot. I stuck in the Jaguar install disk and got that going, but there’s no option there to reset the startup folder. I tried booting from my OS 9.1 disk, but apparently it doesn’t understand HFS+ or something because it wouldn’t mount 2 of my 3 disks. Hmm, problem. How do I start up this machine? Tried some more disks, but most of them won’t boot my particular G4. Luckily I had gotten a cheap version of Norton Utilties a while back and that one seemed to boot up OK. I was then able to use it run the Startup Disk control panel and set it to startup in OS X. I rebooted again and breathed a sigh of relief as OS X booted cleanly.

It’s still very annoying to have to unplug my monitor everytime I reboot and Safari and the Finder are crashing often, which I don’t think happens at 1280 x 1024. Another option is to try my DVI to VGA converter, but then what’s the point of having a DVI monitor?

I think Apple is punishing me for saving $1000 and not buying one of their monitors. Grrrr. I wasn’t planning on buying 10.3, but if it fixes this problem, it might be worth it.

Who am I kidding? I may last a month or two, but there’s no way I’m going to be able to permanently resist buying the latest version OS X.