APRIL 2020 MACWORLD 17are turned on or woken from a
standby state. In other cases, the
display isn’t recognized by your
Mac at all, which thinks it has one
(or more) fewer monitors
connected to it and relocates
windows and icons. These
situations seem to happen more
frequently with older monitors,
but readers regularly report all
sorts of oddities.
You can troubleshoot the
problem by going through this
sequence.
Open the Displays
preference pane, hold down the
Option key, and click the Detect Displays
button that appears where the Gather
Windows button usually sits (at the
lower-right corner of the pane). This
sometimes re-awakens monitors that
have lost their way.
Put your Mac to sleep and then wake
it after a few seconds. This typically solves
the “pink” problem, resyncing the external
monitor.
Turn the external monitor off, wait a
few seconds, and then turn it back on.
Disconnect the external monitor and
reconnect it. I’ve found with USB-C
connections, merely disconnecting an
HDMI cable from the adapter doesn’t help.
I have to unplug the adapter from the
Mac’s port entirely and then plug it back in.
Be very careful! It’s easy to dislodge hard
drive or other cables in the process.
> If you’d prefer to not disconnect
cables, shut down your Mac, turn off all
displays with power switches, power them
back on, and start up again.
If your external monitor is a second
display, as in my case, or a third, fourth,
fifth, etc.—yes, some people have a
plethora of displays—you might have
Desktop items shift during this
troubleshooting from the screen on which
they usually appear to the primary
Desktop. I’ve found consistently that
when my second display is back in action,
those items don’t move back
automatically. I have to drag windows
back where I want them. ■Hold down the Option key to get the Detect Displays
button to appear.