Calibrating one screen is fairly straight forward with the right tools. Just follow the software wizard and you’re done in about 10 minutes. Calibrating two screens can be a little bit more tricky—especially if one of those screens is a laptop display.

I use the latest version of Eye-One Match (v3.6.3 as of this writing). Once figured out how to make the magic happen, it’s really a breeze. Follow these steps and you should be fine…

My Set Up

• 15” MacBook Pro (late 2010) runs OS X (Snow Leopard, v10.6.6)
• 20” XL20 Samsung SyncMaster external display
• laptop screen has been arranged to be the secondary display whenever the XL20 is plugged in
• XL20 contains my menu bar

Let’s Calibrate!

These steps work for me. I’m not saying it’s the only way to accomplish this, but it sure works for me.

Calibrate the laptop display first

• ensure you DO NOT have your external display plugged into your laptop
• start Eye-One Match and follow the steps to calibrate your screen
• save your profile with a meaningful name (such as “MPB-24-03-2011”)

Calibrate the external display next

• plug the secondary display into your laptop
• you may need to ensure that it is set as your main display (not sure about this step)
• start Eye-One Match and follow the steps to calibrate your screen
• save your profile with a meaningful name (such as “XL20-24-03-2011”)

Ensure that you now have two displays with their own ICC profile

• go into “System Preferences” > “Displays”
• click on “Color” tab
• ensure the “Show profiles for this display only” option is checked
• click on “Gather Windows”
• compare the settings

If all is well, you should now have two displays with their own profiles, and your profile settings should look similar to this:

Note the two different profiles.

This could have been such a simple issue to resolve were it not for the odd combination of symptoms.

In any case, I am glad to be able to run my desktop as trusty old workhorse again.

Symptoms of a flawed system

My desktop still doesn’t want to boot half of the time: it has a hard time getting past the XP progress bar on a regular boot, or “mup.sys” during a safe mode boot. So I reinstalled Windows on a new hard drive. Cool that works. For the first 5 days or so. Then it’s back to same same: Windows won’t boot, and if it does, it freezes after a few hours. Turn off all power to the system for 10-60 minutes, and it might reboot some of the time.

Looking for a solution

Alright, maybe it’s not getting enough power. Take out the 3rd SATA disk. Now it’s using the same amount of power as it did prior to instability issues. No luck—same trouble. Unless the PSU is issuing dirty power must be something else instead.

Hmmm… better check RAM. Different combinations. No luck.

Upgrade BIOS. No luck.

Just to make sure: re-install Windows, again. No joy past the first few days.

Take out all power cords & re-insert them. No luck.

Set my DRAM timings manually. No luck.

Oh bother. Those shiny new Macs start to look more appealing by the minute…

Not long ago, we were pushing our computers to the max running photoshop: it just couldn’t handle the complex mix of styled vector data and bitmap imagery. Much to my delight these latest computers are just ripping through the stuff, while at the same time running Dreamweaver, Illustrator, VOIP software and various other applications.

It got me thinking about why these prices had fallen so much. I entertained the notion that this was partly due to millions of gaming enthousiasts pushing the envelope by continously demanding more of their systems–up to a level that surpasses the requirements of most graphics industry professionals.

Similarly P2P folk would have contributed to better network infrastructure and cheaper prices by making file swapping a routine affair. Perhaps we can even go as far as thanking spammers for taking up so much of the internet’s bandwidth with their enormous volume of useless messages. But no, that would be taking this train of thought too far.