Friday, January 02, 2009

Minor Monitor Mayhem

I seem to have this thing with monitors. About a year-and-a-half ago, my trusty CRT died on me in the middle of a live Q&A with my Animation Mentor class. That paved the way for the purchase of the current widescreen LCD monitor, which was humming along just fine...up until this morning.

I powered the computer on, fiddled around for a half-hour or so, then hit the sleep button on the keyboard before heading off to shower. Upon returning a little later, I hit the space bar on the keyboard to wake up the machine. The computer woke up, but the monitor didn't.

At first I thought it might just be a really long delay while the system was processing something before it would fire up the video signal. It had occasionally behaved that way in the past, but after a minute or so of no picture, I figured something else was amiss, so I started testing things. Cable wiggling got me nowhere. Borrowing my wife's monitor (identical to mine...the result of one of those "as long as you're replacing yours, would you mind getting a new one for me?" requests) and plugging it into my box gave me a good picture. That told me that the video card and cable were probably fine, but that the DVI input on my monitor was probably dead, so after work I bought the necessary accoutrements to use the SVGA input, and it doth work again. Yea, verily! Glad to know it's not a total goner. The SVGA signal doesn't look horrible, but it is a tad blurry. Still, I'll gladly sacrifice a little clarity in order to save some dough.

I hope everyone had a great Christmas, and wish you all the best in 2009!

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