Wasting space, and money
This story begins Monday night, at about 11pm, when my ~5 year old 17″ TFT screen (HP 1730) suddenly decided to go black. Its power LED still indicated that it was on, so I guessed the backlight was to blame. When restarting the screen, it just lit up for half a second (showing the correct image) and then went black again. Since the backlight had gone black a few months ago, when it somehow resolved itself after me unplugging the screen trying to find a culprit, I tried unplugging the screen for a few minutes, to no avail. :/
I then googled the issue using my laptop, and found out that the culprit most probably was an old or broken CCFL tube (the backlight, that is) which made the CCFL driver shut itself off as a last resort, in order to not set itself on fire… Because of the age of the screen, I started to look for a new one instead of fixing it.
I endured using a very old 15″ screen, full with stuck pixels and other mayhem, for three whole days while ordering a new one. Thursday evening, just about 32 hours (it took a while deciding which screen to buy since I wasn’t really prepared for this) after placing my order and spending some of my savings, I got my hands on the new one, and I can’t say I’m not happy with it. Samsung SyncMaster 204B. Three inches (or 609 280 pixels) larger than the old one (17″ 1280×1024 vs. 20″ 1600×1200), and a picture so crisp it makes my laptop screen look blurry. It’s just perfect! :D
The only bad thing is that I have a bad habit of maximizing all applications I use. In 1600×1200, that only results in grotesquely large windows and a lot of wasted space. I guess I just have to get rid of that habit. That way I can actually see the wallpaper… ;)
//firetech