The Pile Of Broken Monitors.

You can not have to many monitor, and when programming you need at least two to be efficient so at my developing machine at home I got three. Because three is always better then two.

I had a LG Flatron L246WH that is 24" with the resolution of 1920x1200, And the I had two LG L2000C 20" with the resolution of 1600x1200 and last two are also IPS panels with good viewing angle that is really good for monitor that are at the edges in a multi-monitor setup.

The nice thing about the screens is that they all are 1200 pixel in height. Almost all newer cheaper monitors are only 1080 in height and the extra 120 pixel in height is really nice and I really prefer it.

Then 1.5 year ago (Around March or April in the year 2011) the bigger of them, The 24" screen started to acting up. When start it up the power light was blink for a while before it started. And the time it was blinking before actually showing a picture got longer and longer. After around a month it took 3-4 minutes for it to start. And one day the monitor would never stop blinking, It did not start.

So I thought I would disassemble it and check for it could fix it. Because this kind of problem is often because some of the capacitors in the power supply part has gone bad. And I had experience in fixing that.

So I started to take the monitor apart, but I run into problems. And I had other thing planned so I took another monitor I had for my secondary computer (a 24" Samsung SyncMaster 2493HM with the resolution of 1920x1200) and connected it to my develop machine instead, I was planning of finish the dismantlement of the broken 24" screen later so that I could fix it. So I put the half disassembled monitor under a table and continued with the work I was suppose to do.

But later never come. And a couple of weeks later I was upgrade my secondary machine and I bought a cheap BenQ GL2750 monitor (1920x1080, TN Panel ). It was a cheap and not very good, But good enough for my secondary machine. I only use it for games, testing and Linux, and my half disassembled 24" screen continued to lay there under a table collecting dust.

Time went by I and never got around to fix it. I had my three screens, And I had better things to do.

But then 2 month ago one of my 20" screens started doing the same. Power light blinking and taking longer and longer time to start up. And this time I was really planning on take that apart and see if I could fix it.

I then was in the computer shop getting some new harddrives for my home server and they had a sale on a 24" DELL UltraSharp U2412M monitor. A very good 1920x1200 monitor with IPS panel, So I could not resist and I bought one and then placed the broken 20" screen next to the half disassembled LG screen.

I now had two 24" screens and one 20" screen for my develop machine. But then after a month the remaining 20" screen also started do the same. And from my from previous experience I guessed that I around 3-4weeks before it would not start at all.

So I now had 3 screens that needed fixing and I suspected that all of them just needed some new capacitors and then they would work again.

So I really needed to start fixing them because my pile of broken monitors was starting to take up to much space. So either fix them or throw them out.

So finally last week I opened up the 20" screen and to my surprise it was very easy take apart. Not as complicated as the 24". And as I suspected the capacitors was bulky and needed replacing.

Now I just need to replace them and see if they monitors would work again.

To be continued...