Hello everyone,
I suspect this mess is my fault but I don't know why and what to do.
Some brief details:
A couple months ago I upgraded the GPU of my 21.5" mid-2010 to an nVidia Quadro K1100M. I had some difficulties but in the end, also thanks to your help, I managed to get it working properly with OCLP.
All the issues started when I tried to dual boot it with Windows. On my first attempts it was working fine with W10, but I was not happy with the macOS side (Big Sur wasn't that stable on my machine), so I downgraded to Sierra (10.12.6) which is now rock solid.
With Sierra installed I tried a first time to install W10 and it didn't work (weeks have passed and can't remember the error) and all I got was a brightness problem: most of the times starting macOS via OCLP, when the startup progress bar reached the half, I got a black screen for a second and then it was stuck on minimum brightness, with the brightness control not responding and giving me more black screens.
I wiped my SSD partition map with a linux install disk and then the problem was still there but REALLY less present: in two months I got it just few times, mostly during post-install reboots, and another reboot solved the issue everytime.
This until last week, when I decided to install W10 again (shame on me!): since I was having GPT/MBR errors I decided to install W7 first and then upgrade to W10. The W7 install went nicely, but the upgrade was a disaster. It did work, but every boot was taking 2 minutes after chime to get into the partition menu. Nothing worked: I tried wiping and even replacing my SSD but all I got was having the brightness problem back as well, worse than ever.
Obviously I made PRAM and SMC resets mutiple times.
Now it comes the final part: I tried messing around with RAM (I was using 2 different couples of 2GB modules) and I noticed that after every swap the booting delay was gone (just for the first boot) and the brightness problem was reduced depending on the RAM module I used. Then a module started giving me kernel panic so I decided investing in some brand new RAM: I bought 4x4GB modules and they arrived today.
The first boot was totally fine and I was excited, but as I tried again I still got a booting delay after chime, that is now reduced from 2 minutes to about 40 seconds, and it also disappear once after every RAM swap. PRAM reset don't seem to do much. Apparently there are no more brightness problems so far. So RAM has a role in all these things.
Of course the machine is now more usable than before, but this delay is far from nice, also considering that before my damn upgrade everyting was perfect.
Honestly, I don't know what can be the problem. Firmware stuff?
Really, any kind of suggestion would be very helpful.
Thank you in advance for your patience!
I suspect this mess is my fault but I don't know why and what to do.
Some brief details:
A couple months ago I upgraded the GPU of my 21.5" mid-2010 to an nVidia Quadro K1100M. I had some difficulties but in the end, also thanks to your help, I managed to get it working properly with OCLP.
All the issues started when I tried to dual boot it with Windows. On my first attempts it was working fine with W10, but I was not happy with the macOS side (Big Sur wasn't that stable on my machine), so I downgraded to Sierra (10.12.6) which is now rock solid.
With Sierra installed I tried a first time to install W10 and it didn't work (weeks have passed and can't remember the error) and all I got was a brightness problem: most of the times starting macOS via OCLP, when the startup progress bar reached the half, I got a black screen for a second and then it was stuck on minimum brightness, with the brightness control not responding and giving me more black screens.
I wiped my SSD partition map with a linux install disk and then the problem was still there but REALLY less present: in two months I got it just few times, mostly during post-install reboots, and another reboot solved the issue everytime.
This until last week, when I decided to install W10 again (shame on me!): since I was having GPT/MBR errors I decided to install W7 first and then upgrade to W10. The W7 install went nicely, but the upgrade was a disaster. It did work, but every boot was taking 2 minutes after chime to get into the partition menu. Nothing worked: I tried wiping and even replacing my SSD but all I got was having the brightness problem back as well, worse than ever.
Obviously I made PRAM and SMC resets mutiple times.
Now it comes the final part: I tried messing around with RAM (I was using 2 different couples of 2GB modules) and I noticed that after every swap the booting delay was gone (just for the first boot) and the brightness problem was reduced depending on the RAM module I used. Then a module started giving me kernel panic so I decided investing in some brand new RAM: I bought 4x4GB modules and they arrived today.
The first boot was totally fine and I was excited, but as I tried again I still got a booting delay after chime, that is now reduced from 2 minutes to about 40 seconds, and it also disappear once after every RAM swap. PRAM reset don't seem to do much. Apparently there are no more brightness problems so far. So RAM has a role in all these things.
Of course the machine is now more usable than before, but this delay is far from nice, also considering that before my damn upgrade everyting was perfect.
Honestly, I don't know what can be the problem. Firmware stuff?
Really, any kind of suggestion would be very helpful.
Thank you in advance for your patience!
