I'm worried about my monitor

[Griselda]

Well, the monitor finally died. The popping had stopped for a few months, but then it came back, worse than ever, in the past week. Finally, there was a loud pop, and the power light flickered and then went out. Now, when I press the power button, nothing happens. 2:

We have a ton of holiday bills, so it's not a great time to buy a new monitor, but I happened to find this one. It's got $80 in rebates, and Office Depot has a $30 off coupon out, too, so the final cost will only be around $70. It's pretty much exactly the same monitor I was replacing, too. Nothing fancy, but you just can't beat a $70 monitor.

I'm typing this on my daughter's monitor, which I've taken back from her for the weekend. It's the same monitor I used to use when I played D1. I killed Diablo for the first time using this monitor. It took forever to get it working, though, considering the resolution and everything was set up for a newer monitor. Finally I found VGA mode, and was able to turn everything way down so that the monitor would at least try to show stuff.

Now I just have to see if there's still a monitor repair place in town- maybe little Gris can have my old one, and the Diablo monitor can go back to the attic.

Happy New Year, everyone!

-Griselda

[Ashock]

My monitor has been acting strangely lately. When I look at the edge of the screen, I can see a waviness that slowly travels up the edge of the screen. Sometimes, it has little "blips" where it makes a strange sound like it's about to shut itself off. That happens fast enough that I couldn't tell you whether the picture is affected at all.

I'd like to get this monitor to last as long as possible (although it's a couple of years older than my computer, which is hardly new itself). But, I'm not sure if there are good ways to do that. For now, I've set the screen refresh rate to the lowest possible setting that this monitor supports. Will that do anything useful? Are there other tricks that I can use?

-Griselda

Your monitor is on it's last legs. I'd give it several months tops. I've had 2 monitors do that in the last 15 years or so, and they both died soon after. No fires, but a nice smell and blackened plastic did accompany it. Luckily for you, monitors are cheap these days.



-A

[Nystul]

Ahh, I still remember when my first monitor finally died (after some 5 years of use). The screen would go black on me, and I'd ressurect the picture by tapping the side of the monitor. After a few months of this symptom getting worse, I was literally hammering the top of the monitor with my fist over and over again trying to get the thing to come back. 2: Finally I couldn't hammer hard enough, and had to give in and get a new one.

Now for my Scrooge story. While you are trying to recover from your Christmas bills, I am looking at my check from the week ending Dec. 25th: 22 hours of overtime dealing with a million last minute Christmas shipments and one nasty ice storm. The week ending the 18th, I worked seven days, getting overtime on the sixth day and doubletime on the seventh. Somewhere in those weeks I got a bad cold, downed a bottle of Nyquil, and got my coworkers all sick. Since nobody else gets me cool Christmas presents anymore, I take these two checks and have a little shopping spree on Newegg.