And so it went through the day-from Bermuda I headed to San Juan, Puerto Rico, then flew a short hop to the island of Bonaire (best shore scuba diving on the planet, I’ve heard), followed by a long leg to Guatemala City, a super-long segment up to Los Angeles, and finally, a late-evening flight home to Portland, Oregon. Once the autopilot had the plane on course, I went back to work. So I launched at dawn from Boston’s Logan International Airport, set the destination for Bermuda (hey, might as well go somewhere nice!, and started flying. I’d then fly the last few minutes of the arrival, and repeat the process for the next destination. As X-Plane includes autopilot features, I could do this with only a minimal amount of work on my part-basically program a destination in the autopilot, take off, start on course, then let the autopilot fly the route. With the old video card, this would lead to a guaranteed lockup, anywhere from 30 minutes to a few hours after I started the program. So as a stress test, I thought I’d fire up X-Plane and have it fly between various airports while I went about my day’s work. X-Plane, a multi-platform flight simulator-flying X-Plane is about as close as I’ll ever get to flying the “big iron,” and it’s a fun way to practice my instrument flying skills, which haven’t been exercised in the real world in a decade or so. To make a long story short, I recently had the card replaced (with another ATI X1900XT), and then wanted to find some way to really test the new card and make sure it was working.

Even after cleaning the dust out, my problems persisted. See the dust), which can’t be a good thing. While there was no dust evident on the outside of my card, when I took off the heat sink, I found quite a bit of dust directly on the graphics processing chip ( But if I did something like try to play a bit of Need for Speed Carbon or X-Plane in my free time-or even use Quartz Composer to test some hints-the machine would usually lock up tight after some unpredictable amount of time. As long as I never pushed the card, everything was fine. Like my colleague Dan Frakes, I too had beenĮxperiencing video card problems with the ATI X1900XT in my Mac Pro. “What?, what’s the relationship between the two?” you’re probably thinking. Have you ever stopped to think about just how far personal computing has come in a relatively short period of time? It’s not something I do often, but I recently did just that, mainly thanks to a bad video card in my Mac Pro.

Free flight simulator for macbook pro