The Power Supply Tale

After having become the proud owner of a 23-inch Apple Cinema Display, for about 30 minutes I could not figure out why it did not light up. I was sure that it was tested and it was working. Simply put, I was going nuts trying to figure this problem out.
After trying to troubleshoot some more: restarting my Mac Pro again and again, re-installing all the cables back, dusting some off, etc. – it still didn’t work. The LED in the front panel was blinking, but didn’t look very healthy. It showed that there was some kind of life, yet not very consistent.
Anyway, it turned out to be a very silly mistake that was fixed later, and I want to share this with you.
I was replacing my old 20-inch Cinema Display with a 23-inch, but I was using the power supply from the 20-inch. Duuuh! The answer was that the power supply that comes with the 23-inch produces more amps to feed the larger screen.
Anyway, this gave me another idea. I had my 1TB LaCie external hard disk die on me a couple of weeks ago, and I thought it was the end of it. So I bought a new external hard disk, a My Book 1TB. Then, after the experience with the power supply on the 23-inch display, I realized that I had made the same mistake with the hard drive: I had connected the power supply that was for my 500GB LaCie disk to the 1TB one – causing the same effect as that with the displays.
So, I’ve learned that you never mess with the power supplies. Either they will zap you, or they will make you go nuts. But at least this short story has a happy ending, and it might save you the angst I suffered from making such a simple mistake.
by Omran Al-Owais