Three monitors died

Posted by KureiGio@reddit | retrobattlestations | View on Reddit | 8 comments

Hello community I am writing to you because in the last few months I have found myself having to replace the third consecutive monitor and i no longer believe it is a coincidence. I have a station dedicated to retrogaming consisting of a PC on which I use Windows XP. I have always connected 4:3 monitors to have an experience faithful to that of the past, but what happened is that three monitors suddenly stopped working correctly. In particular, the last two have problems with the panel for which one has become completely white while the other flickers and this also happens when they are powered but not connected to a device or a video card. What could be the cause of this damage? I thought it was electromagnetic interference so I downloaded an app from the store and at the moment the accused seems to be a pair of cheap speakers that I placed under the monitors. It is possible that they are the ones that caused the malfunction? I also want to ask you if it is possible to recover the monitors and if by waiting or performing some operation It is possible to make them work correctly. Thanks!

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KureiGio@reddit (OP)

Thanks everyone for the replies. The screens I'm talking about are LCD screens. Unfortunately, I don't have testers so I can't check the capacitors. Thanks for your opinions

canthearu_ack@reddit

I am having good luck with a Samsung 19 inch LCD monitor I recapped. (5:4 pixel aspect ratio) This one is my goto for testing and every day stuff. Save the CRTs for when the itch is real.

I have seen other LCDs die though ... very hit an miss when they get this old.

One of the most common failure modes after bad capacitors is that the front buttons stop working or start randomly activating.

Lukeno94@reddit

Based on the way you've described them - I'm going to assume you're talking about TFTs here and not CRTs. For TFTs, I'd expect them to be a lot less at risk from bad speakers than CRTs were.

If a screen is completely white with no other picture - it sounds like the only thing it is running is the backlight. This could be a problem with the internal cables working loose, but that's more likely to happen on a laptop than a dedicated monitor; it is still worth reseating them and seeing if that is indeed what it was.

As others have mentioned - this is the peak time for the capacitor plague, and monitors in particular have often been victims of companies cheaping out big style and using cheap/marginal capacitors, often with poor cooling as well. The flickering screen definitely sounds like it is suffering from bad caps, and it could easily be the case for the other two as well.