Lately my stuff has been failing. Luckily, ALL of them were still within warranty. Back at this post, I was lamenting that my stuff all seemed to start dying at the same time.

Last week, a new item joined this infamous list – my relatively new 21-inch LCD Monitor. Yeah the one I use to play games on. What happened was that it started showing red dots scattered all over the screen, and it doesn’t ALWAYS happen. It would happen when the screen went into high-resolution mode (ie anything more than 1600×1200) with pictures with dark grey bits. Incidentally the native resolution of the monitor is 1920×1080, and yes that means HEAPS of red dots all over the place!

Doing what most techs would do, I started troubleshooting. “Google is your friend” so goes the saying, except in this case it wasn’t. It told me that red dots could be a symptom of 2 problems – either the VRAM on the video card was faulty, or the DVI cable was. Well yeah, I *REALLY* need an excuse for a video card upgrade, especially now that I’m “between jobs” – NOT! So off I went to Sim Lim, to look for a new card and a new DVI cable. Back at home, I started with the easiest thing first – I swapped out the DVI cable. Nope, no good. Still showing red dots.

So I had to get down and dirty and open up the case to put in a new card. 10 mins later, I fired it all up again, and…. red dots still. Damn!

On a whim, I dragged my other PC over, and turned that on too using the 21-inch monitor. Same deal.

DAMN! IT WAS THE MONITOR!

After all, it wasn’t the cable, it wasn’t the card. Even on a different PC it showed the same fault. It has got to be the monitor at fault.

What was even weirder, was that it was only the DVI port that gave me the problem. If I connected with VGA connection, it’s fine. If I hooked it up with an HDMI cable, it’s fine too. It was *ONLY* the DVI connection that failed. So off I went hunting for the warranty. I looked at the date – 26th June 2009.

Wow with less than a week left to the end of the warranty, I called up HP for service (yeah the monitor’s a HP 2159m). The CS officer was clearly a tech too. He wasn’t following any script to handle my call. I told him what I did – swapping cables, cards, PCs, drivers etc. At the end of my 3 minute call, he just said simply – “We’ll send a replacement unit over. You’ve already done everything that we’d do”.

The next day the replacement unit came. We swapped the monitors and viola – my red dot problems were gone with the DVI port. Even the tech that came was amazed – he said he’d NEVER  seen such a weird problem (neither have I actually). According to him, and I believed so too, if the monitor started showing red dots, it should do so across the board – on ALL connections it should show the same fault. That was why I didn’t think it was a monitor fault at first too.

I seriously hope nothing else fails. The monitor was the “newest” of my stuff.  Anything else fails now, they’re definitely out of warranty.