No sparklies today

[dreamshark]

This is weird. Shortly before I turned off the computer last night, my screen suddenly, spontaneously, cleared up. All the little green sparklies around the edges of the blue areas went away, along with the green line of sparkles down the middle of the screen. I just powered up the 'puter today, and it still looks fine.

So whatever it is, it's intermittent.

Comments

[von-krag.livejournal.com]

Un-seat and reseat all of your cables from the monitor to the computer. There's prolly a bit of oxidation built up and it needs cleaning.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

There's just one cable from the monitor to the computer and it's brand new (came with the monitor). I already tried tightening both ends of the cable and it had no effect.

[von-krag.livejournal.com]

IME cables are the single thing no one building electronics spends money on. Try it if it starts happening again. Then, at least you have a place to start from in your bug hunt.

[jbru.livejournal.com]

Don't you just love intermittent problems? At one of my jobs in the past the computers would give people fits until I came to sit by them and observe the problem. The problem wouldn't re-occur for at least several days after a visit, so I was pretty popular.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

You have a natural ability that makes you a good support person.

Unfortunately, I have the opposite ability. When I try to do stuff, it breaks. This makes me a good tester, but is not helpful in the home setting. Even more unfortunately, nobody else in my family will learn anything at all about setting up electronic equipment because they have the idea that I'm the "expert." They don't seem to realize that being goog at breaking things that normally work fine for other people is not the right kind of expertise.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

Can you Degauss the screen?

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

I don't think so. I went through the whole monitor menu and there is no such option. I've never been sure what "degaussing" was, but I'm guessing it makes about as much sense for an LCD monitor as "Rewind Disk".

[barondave.livejournal.com]

You're correct, you need to degauss a CRT, and not normally an LCD. In a CRT, that would be one of the first things I'd try, just to slough off some extra magnetism that seem to be firing pixels. On an LCD, you still might have spare electrons, but not from the monitor's electron gun. If there's no degaussing option, the makers clearly don't think it's a major problem. Are you using a grounded plug? (Are you watching too much X-Files?)

Bah. Just take it back and let them deal with it.

[mmagidow.livejournal.com]

We call this Sparkilization Monitor Intermittent Random Farkness (SMIRF). It usually responds to being beaten with a defective keyboard. :-}