New Year's Resolution
Tl;DR: After replacing the capacitors twice during 16+ years of regular use, I am finally getting a new monitor.
Back in approximately 2007/2008, I bought a new monitor: a Samsung Syncmaster 206BW. It was a big step, upgrading me from a CRT to a flatscreen (though chunky by today’s standards), and taking my resolution from (something like) 1024x768 up to a whopping 1680x1050!
Since then, I’ve used the 206BW as the only monitor for my computer at home. Twice it has died, but the fix (easily found online) is typically to open it up and replace a few bulging capacitors (requires a soldering iron, but otherwise not too difficult). The first time I was able to pop into a brick-and-mortar Maplin and buy the individual capacitors I needed, though sadly in 2018 all Maplin stores closed.
On 2024-01-05 the 206BW died once more.1 After 16+ years, I finally decided it was time to retire the 206BW and get a new monitor. Finally, in the 2024 new year, I enter the full HD era with a resolution of 1920x1080.
Additionally, I had been having trouble connecting it to a newer laptop which has an HD screen. For some strange reason, Windows struggled to drive the monitor at a suitable resolution, and the screen was always fuzzy. This was not an issue with the monitor, but with Windows. I explored many ways to fix this within Windows, and found this tool extremely useful in diagnosing the situation. In short, Windows 10 (running on my laptop) seemed to be incorrectly identifying the resolution of the monitor, and it would not permit me to set a suitable resolution and refresh rate. A workaround was to set a smaller resolution, but that was also a poor experience. Strangely, Windows 10 on my PC did not have the issue. Unfortunately, this issue, combined with the capacitors bulging for the third time, justified finding a replacement monitor. ↩︎