This happened some months ago, but since I was in a writing hiatus in the last half of 2019 due to eye surgery I’m only writing/posting it now.
“So, what broke this time?”, I hear all of you asking.
My precious…
My faithful…
And stupidly old…
Monitor.
640 words
Samsung SyncMaster 172x
It was an old and faithful friend, that monitor.
Bought it way back in late 2004, a few months after it came out.
Price? Around 700€. (yes, seven hundred fucking euros)
Could have bought some cheaper monitor for perhaps 150€-200€ at the time, but I wanted this one: 12ms response, 1280×1024, 17 inches and a very sleek design.
More money than brains? Perhaps.
But the damned thing lasted me 15 years of daily use (up to 16 hours a day, normally about 10-12 hours), with only a burst capacitor on the power supply (some 0.50€ for a new capacitor and a bit of soldering)
I guess it was an worthwhile investment.
That burst capacitor story was kinda funny.
Everything was working great, one day I turn my speakers on (I normally use headphones) and I notice an electrical buzz coming from them, something electrical was malfunctioning nearby.
I start plugging and unplugging stuff until I conclude it was the monitor’s AC adaptor (a typical power brick).
I open the power brick very carefully…nah, I’m kidding, it’s one of those that you have to open forcibly, no screws visible or under labels, to close it I had to use duct tape.
So, I open it and notice the burst cap, I went to the local electronic shop, got a new one and soldered it. Took me about one hour.
Fixed, lasted another two or three years until now when the monitor died.
Back to a more recent past.
Early in 2019 I had one of these always nice moments of water going down the wrong pipe when I’m drinking a mouthful of water (epiglottis you have betrayed me!) while sitting in front of the monitor playing Farming Simulator. Yeah…the dust from the crops, man…
So, of course, I coughed like a mofo and the monitor got covered with a shower of water forcibly ejected from my mouth.
Result? The buttons stopped working. Well, they actually started working too much as they were randomly “pressing” themselves.
But that lasted only a couple of hours until the monitor stopped turning on and off and changing brightness and whatnot at random.
Everything was reasonably OK, other than the buttons only working when they felt like and pressing any of them doing the same as pressing the power button, until one day somewhere in August 2019 I’m at the computer and…darkness, completely blank screen.
Clearly it wasn’t the graphics card dying and failing to send signal or something, the monitor would have warned me with an on screen message.
No…this was much worse.
Maybe it was the back-light? Gave it some light with a torch (flashlight) and no sign of any image anywhere. Oh, noes…
I grab my tools and start opening the monitor up.
Long story short, after much fiddling I got nothing. It was fubar.
172x I loved you…but death comes to everything, especially things you love.
So, I was in the market for another monitor and this time I didn’t have 700€ to spend on it. Life changes.
This time the budget was closer to 90-100€.
So, I went to the website of some computer shop I sometimes buy shit at and chose the 2nd cheapest monitor of a decent size (and with two inputs, HDMI and VGA)
I ended up with a LG 22MK400H-B, 22″ (fuckhuge compared to the 172x), 1920×1080, 5ms.
About 90€, was delivered at my door two days after ordering.
I’ve already been using it for a few months by now and it seems kinda decent, hope it will last a few years without issues.
And that’s the post about my now dead monitor.