"Blinded By The White" by Troy H. Cheek on Sep 07, 2009
The other morning, I woke as usual, rose as usual, staggered past the computer with the blinding white screen as usual, went to the bathroom as... Wait a minute. Something's not right here.
After taking care of other pressing matters, I returned to the computer. We have several around the house, but the one I use is the "main" one. It's the one with the fastest processor, most memory, most and fastest hard disk space, and all the TV tuners. It's the hub which feeds the rest of them while at the same time being my daily work computer and game station. It also has the biggest, baddest 22" 1680x1050 widescreen monitor. It's marked KDS though the NVIDIA control panel calls it a ProView. I'm thinking that I paid about $300 for it a couple or three years ago. I remember paying $400 for a 20" monitor a few years before that. (Well, it was supposed to be $300, but I forgot to send in the coupon.) If trends continue, I'll soon be able to get a 24" monitor for $200.
Searching around, I found an article I wrote back when I bought the KDS monitor and enjoyed the switch to widescreen. Back in February of 2007, I wrote "Enter the $300 KDS K22mdwb 22-inch LCD Multimedia Monitor, Black. 'K' because it's made by KDS. '22' for 22 inches. 'm' is multimedia. 'd' is display. That 'w' means that it's w_i_d_e_s_c_r_e_e_n or, in computer terms, a 16:10 aspect ratio. The native resolution is 1680x1050, which seems really weird to me, but a quick internet search reveals it is fairly common. 'b' means it's black."
This monitor has served me wonderfully for two and half years, or roughly one and a half years after the warranty ran out. I didn't have any problems with it. Admittedly, I had a little difficulty with the tiny little icons and letters at first, but I quickly got used to it, so we'll count that as no problems. No problems at all.
The first problem was the blinding white screen. Well, it probably wasn't a problem, I told myself. I had gone to bed watching videos. I keep the last 8 or 10 episodes of MythBusters on hand for just such a purpose. Their soothing voices and muffled explosions help me sleep. I supposed it was possible that the video driver had locked up and gone all white, or that the playback had frozen up when the screen was all white, or simply that the video had ended in the middle of a massive explosion as MythBusters episodes are apt to do.
However, wiggling the mouse and hitting the space key didn't seem to do anything. I reset the computer, but when I came back a few minutes later, the screen was all white again. I powered down, unplugged all the wires running to and from the monitor, plugged everything back in, hit all the vents with a can of compressed air, and powered back up. Having appeased the gods of poor connections and overheating components, the monitor acted normally.
Convinced that I'd fixed the monitor problem, I went to town and spent the day doing pretty much nothing. While I could have spent the day pricing new monitors, and indeed I had considered doing just that, I decided to spend the day goofing off. When I got home, the monitor was a blinding white again.
Looking more closely, I saw that the display was not completely white. Near the edges there were odd vertical lines which were slightly darker than pure white with hints of blue and red. As red, green, and blue are primary colors, this indicated a primary problem. I tried cycling the power just on the monitor, whereas before I'd shut down the computer and let the monitor power itself off. When the monitor came back on, I noticed that the white didn't quite reach the corners, then quickly bled to cover the whole screen. It was the first time I'd seen the whitening in action, so it might have been doing that all along.
My video card, an e-GeForce 8600 GT, has dual DVI outputs, so I tried the monitor on the other output. Same thing. A backup monitor worked fine on both outputs, but it was a VGA monitor using a little adapter, so perhaps that wasn't a fair test. Then I realized that my main monitor was doing the white bleed thing even though it wasn't hooked up to anything at the time. Okay. Obviously a bad monitor.
It was getting late, so I didn't want to go back to town. Worse yet, I was about to work some overtime on a holiday weekend, so I knew I wouldn't have a chance to shop around. I went to a couple of my favorite websites and, using the above extrapolation, looked for 24" monitors for about $200. I found the following:
The Synaps 11010230Y3 24" Widescreen LCD Monitor with Speakers offers top value and fine quality features for your computing experience. With a 24" flat-panel LCD that furnishes 25% more viewing area than 4:3 monitors, the Synaps 11010230Y3 uses less than half the energy of a 24-inch CRT monitor and has a clear aspect ratio of 16:9. Enjoy high quality 1920 x 1080 resolution and 16.7 million colors to display realistic photo and video reproduction. Other features include 1000:1 native contrast ratio, 5ms response time and DVI connection. The Synaps 24" Widescreen LCD will bring endless hours of efficient quality viewing.
It was $250 but had a $50 instant rebate. I'm sure that some of you are screaming at me right now saying that I could have gotten a better deal if I'd looked harder or that $200 is too much for a monitor. Regardless, I placed the order and hope to get the new monitor soon. I even paid a little extra for 2nd day delivery.
In the mean time, I needed a computer to work with. The backup monitor worked just fine, but it didn't have any speakers. Sure, I don't really need speakers for work, but they're useful for watching recorded television shows or listening to music. Games just don't feel right without sound. The speakers on the main monitor worked just fine, but the monitor would power itself down after a few seconds of no video signal. The plan was to hook the main monitor to the other output of the video card.
I did so. Of course, it took a while to convince Windows XP that I didn't want the nonworking monitor to be my primary monitor. Even then, Windows was wanting to extend my desktop onto the nonworking monitor. My mouse and program windows kept disappearing. The solution was to make the nonworking monitor a clone of the working one. I finally got Windows to admit that was what I was trying to do.
As I clicked on the last button and Windows accepted the clone command, the nonworking monitor suddenly started working. Colors and shapes faded in from a white cloud as if it was a bad special effect. Suddenly, I was looking at a perfect clone of my other monitor.
Well, sure, it was working for the moment, but it had worked for a little while when I'd "fixed" it before. I left both monitors running when I went to bed that night, listening to the MythBusters.
In the morning, the broken monitor was still working. I moved it back to its usual place. I checked the order for the new monitor and it had already shipped, so it was too late to cancel. Of course, I'm sure that if I had managed to cancel, the monitor would have died before I could close the browser window.
The next day, the broken monitor was all white again. Actually, I can see more and more of those vertical lines, but that might be because of the weird viewing angle; I've got it up on the shelf where the backup monitor used to sit.
Checking the package tracker, my new monitor is now sitting in a warehouse just a few miles from my house, but won't be delivered for another couple of days. In fact, thanks to the holiday shipping schedule, I'll be receiving the new monitor on the same day my overtime will be over and I would have been able to start shopping around.
Figures.
