🚀 go-pugleaf

I have a Mac Pro with a Radeon X1900 GT graphics card, on which I've been running various Creative Suite apps for about 2.5 years without incident.

Until last week, when I upgraded from CS3 to CS4. Without going into detail, after various "hiccups" I ended up wiping out all evidence of previous CS installations using Adobe's cleaning script and installing CS4 from scratch (Master Collection).

Starting that very day I've been having a serious display problem. If I'm going to leave my computer for any length of time, I put it to sleep. But, starting the day I installed CS4, when I woke up my computer the display stayed black. The monitor itself still responded to be turned on and off (using the hardware button on the side), as evidenced by the power light's reactions, but the screen itself stayed totally black. No sign of life.

I shut the computer down, restarted. Nothing. I pulled the graphics card out and blew off the dust with compressed air. No good. I started the computer in Safe mode. Still wouldn't work.

Then I unplugged the monitor from my desktop, and plugged it into my laptop. It worked fine. I plugged it back into my desktop...black screen.

So the display itself seems to be fine. The computer seems to be fine too - I can share screens with it and see that behind that black display everything is just as I left it and in working order.

I shut down for the night, and the next morning it worked. However, when I put it to sleep...the display the same thing upon waking up the computer (that is, nothing). I shut it down for many hours, and it worked again...until the computer went to sleep. It seems like once the card shuts down (or whatever is causing the display to act dead) the computer has to be shut down for many hours before it works again. This suggests the graphics card is the problem, and perhaps an overheating issue (which I've never had in the past).

The wrinkle to that theory is that this morning I turned on the computer and it worked fine, and then after being on for only a few minutes I put it to sleep and the problem occurred. I don't know how hot the card could have gotten in just a couple of minutes - a couple of minutes, by the way, of not running any applications or doing any work on it. Just sitting there.

So I'm stuck. It looks like I'm going to have to get a new graphics card, but I'm afraid that perhaps the card isn't the problem after all, or that whatever happened to that card will happen to any new one I put in.

I can't say conclusively that CS4 is the culprit...but it's awfully coincidental that after 2.5 years this problem suddenly occurred the very first time I put the system to sleep after installing it...