Smoking a monitor
 

I was very suspicious of the monitor that had been attached to the Cellar pre-crash. It was acting kinda flaky, and it had been whining. (whaaaaa! you always set the contrast too high! this pile of books isn't a proper stand! this is a stupid site to browse!)

Jacquelita has been having computer problems and I have been helping her out. I fixed her system - it needed a whole new motherboard and a new install, so she brought the system over and I set it up with a new monitor I got to replace the old Cellar monitor.

She took it home and it didn't work because the refresh rate was too high for her monitor. She brought the whole thing over again, with her monitor, and it turns out she had a pretty old monitor, and it turns out it also had two bent pins and would not work any longer. I brought out the old Cellar monitor and offered it as a possibility. We booted the system up with it.

Well once it got to the point in the boot where it goes to the higher resolution, POP-fizzzzzzz and then this very fine smoke appears at the back of the monitor.

Luckily we were right by the porch doors and I could just pick it up and set it outside to smoke at will. But there you have it: the lesson being, if you install a setup for someone, make sure you set it up with a resolution and refresh rate that their monitor can handle.

Oh, OK, thanks for spelling that out. I thought the lesson was, don't fix computers for friends or relatives! :thumb:

Wow, I screw that one up on a irregular basis, and that's never happened to me. That sucks a bunch.
I also learned once why you're supposed to hit the power button BEFORE opening the monitor case (hint: there's a GREAT big capacitor in there to start the monitor).
BZZZZZZTTTT!!!

Back in the day, when I was wrangling computers instead of nuts, one of the secretaries at the company I worked for wet her pants when a capacitor blew off a board in the CRT she was using.

Being a secretary she hadn't understood that the text size wasn't supposed to wobble in and out and MAYBE she should tell the geek about it.

That must have been a real old monitor. The ability to damage a monitor by applying too much resolution (too high frequency) I though had long been designed out of monitors.

It was an HP, about 5-6 years old. It was already suspect, but it was definitely the switch to the higher frequency that let the smoke out.

If the flyback transformer had been weak, a change to a higher frequency could definitely cause it to smoke. Higher frequency = More heat for a flyback.

Was it blue smoke? :D

Are you sure it wasn't a HP dual output monitor set for English/Native American?

When I first saw this post, I thought of all of the hippies here and imagined somebody grabbing the EZ extra-wide pack and rolling a lizard up in one.

A customers moniter was makeing this high pitched whine once , they couldn't hear it , i told them it was about to go out , they said i was crasy and it was fine , the PC gods smiled down on me and at that verry instant the magic smoke came out and it died . They tend to listen to me now !!!!!