wink     ; )

New Monitor

I was working on a paper for Hebrew last night when my monitor suddenly dripped to half brightness. An hour later, it dropped to 1/10th brightness. (It is darn hard to see what's going on at 1/10th brightness.) My monitor then switch between full, half, and tenth brightness every n seconds (where n is a random number between 5 and 30).

I knew that my computer was fine, but my monitor was apparently about to go. Knowing that though my paper would be fine even if my monitor died, it would be exraordinarily difficult to work on it without a monitor, I quickly saved it to removable media. Then for good measure, I backed up my entire system, since I hadn't done that in a while. My monitor was flicking from one brightness to another the whole time, making it very difficult to accomplish even these simple tasks.

By now it was 1 AM, so I went to bed.

Today, my monitor was still acting up, and the 1/10th was now down to about 1/50th. And the now it was almost never at full brightness--it would just flick between half and 1/50th.

So I went shopping. My old monitor was about three years old. I bought it cheap at Frys and it was a noname brand. The refresh rate was slow and the colors were dim and it was only 14".

I now have sitting on my desk a brand new 17" crisp bright monitor. Sooooooo nice.