decidedlyodd

This afternoon I got a wild hair to hook my old 17″ LCD monitor up as a second monitor on my iMac. Unfortunately, there’s no VGA socket on the newer iMacs, so I had to run off to the Apple store in U Village to buy a mini-DVI to DVI adapter. The hope was then to use the DVI to VGA adapter that came with my G4 Powerbook to hook up the monitor. Sadly, this didn’t work at all and the hour it took me with traffic left me even more annoyed. The new adapter is mini-DVI to DVI-D while the old one is DVI-I to VGA. The difference between DVI-D and DVI-I is that the latter has pins for both digital and analog signals. Consequently, you can’t convert from DVI-D to VGA because there’s no analog signal. Moreover, the connectors will not go together.

Skulking around from my discovery, I started browsing online for monitors and was surprised by how much they’ve dropped in price. The last time I bought an LCD monitor was in 2000, so it’s been a while since I’ve shopped for them. In the end I decided to run over to Fry’s to pick up a 20″ or 22″ monitor for about $300. I went for the Samsung SyncMaster 226BW and it seems to be working out well. So much desk space! I’ve been enjoying dual headed monitors at work for a while, so it’s nice to have it at home. I’m probably going to bring the old 17″ LCD in to work to use instead of the crappy 17″ CRT that’s hooked up as my second monitor there.

While there, I also picked up a 1G RAM chip for my iMac as well. I wanted to max out the memory since lately things have been a bit sluggish when I have a lot of apps plus VMWare Fusion (running a full Windows XP) open. Beforehand, I had 1.5GB in there–1 GB chip I added and a 512MB chip that came with the machine. I replaced the 512 MB with the 1G, which means I now have an extra 512MB chip laying around. Still, the price was pretty low for that too (only $30 and I saw it for as low as $23 online but didn’t want to deal with the shipping hassles).