Ah yes…it’s business as usual…another day…another of Dick’s (my PC) parts bites the dust. I was actually pleased about what happened this time. It was something a bit out of the ordinary. Not the usual graphics card blowing up, or motherboard thinking it’s a pencil sort of stuff.
This time it was my monitor. Three and a half years old. LG 700E. CRT. 17″ non-flat. SXVGA (that’s a maximum resolution of 1280×1024). And now it’s gone.
It was funny. One morning, I switched on the monitor, the PC being already running all night, and I noticed something funny about the display. Flickering and wavy lines…the sort you see on long distance transmissions in sci-fi movies. I thought my 8600 was going to conk out again, so I took some emergency measures, the simples of which being switching off the PC for a while. It had been donloading for a while now, so I though a bit of cooling down would help. I had almost killed my motherboard last time by letting it run for too long.
Anyway, after I booted the PC again, the problem persisted, so I came to the logical consclusion that my monitor was acting up. I didn’t pay much attention to it, and continued with my work.
Later in the day, I started Burnout Paradise. My PC, being 3 years old, isn’t exactly all that great for the game, and I had set the resolution low, and just as Burnout changed resolution, I heard a faint ping, and then darkness. Quite undramatic actually.
If I switched off the monitor and restarted it, I would just hear the faint ping, instead of the sound of degaussing. I was pondering for quite a while, and called up Mom to ask if we could ask for a spare monitor or something. And that’s when she reminded my that we still had the old 15 inch monitor from my Compaq Presario. Agreed it’s white, which goes against the colour scheme of my entire PC (black with silver highlights). But it works. And it has been working for over 8 years. Agreed it’s just 15″ diagonally and supports a max resolution of 1024×768. but it works…
And this makes me think about quality. I clearly remember when I was about to buy my PC, that I wanted a Philips monitor, but they gave me a LG one anyway, and I didn’t quite mind at the time, but now I think that I should have raised hell. If only my monitor was like my LG refrigerator, which has been running flawlessly for over a decade.
But now I have a newfound respect for my old ‘heap of junk’. I think I’ll try to get the old PC fixed…needs a ROM flash or something…otherwise it’s completely fine…and quite ancient…but that’s OK.