The Lone Red Pixel
March 14, 2005 – 11:52 pmSam, one of the guys in my lab and the TA for my CFD class, recently ordered a new monitor for his lab computer. He ordered this sweet 19″ LCD from Dell, and it arrived this past Friday. It took a little while to get it set up for Linux, though, because the Xorg configuration program had a hard time automatically detecting the sync and refresh rates. On Monday, Sam pointed out to me a small red dot on his screen that never went away, even if he turned his monitor off and back on or opened a new application. I suggested he plug the monitor into his laptop to see if the dot was there, and sure enough it was. The monitor has a single pixel that is always red, and even though a single pixel is very tiny, one that is always red is pretty damn annoying. Or funny, if it’s not your monitor. Anyway, Sam called the people at Dell, and they’re shipping him a new one. He just has to put the “defective” one back in their box and ship it back to them (on Dell’s dime, of course). Not too shabby.
In another instance of the monitor gods working against us, Guillaume’s monitor in the lab blew up tonight. Well, not literally. I wasn’t here when it happened, but Eric and Kristjan said they heard a loud pop and turned around to see a small cloud of smoke arising from the back of Guillaume’s monitor (not an LCD). Sure enough, if you lean over the back of the monitor and take a whiff, you will definitely smell some burned electronics. That’s always disappointing. Or funny, if it’s not your monitor.
6 Responses to “The Lone Red Pixel”
That’s impressive (on Dell’s part). A lot of companies have a “three or more defective pixel” policy or some such.
And a blown monitor, huh? I blame the guy in charge of buying power strips.
By MDA on Mar 15, 2005 at 12:33 am
Was this the Dell Ultrasharp 2001FP (1600×1200 resolution, 20.1″ diagonal, currently selling for ~$560)? If so, I may grab one. I didn’t think that Dell’s dead pixel policy would take back a monitor with just one dead pixel. BTW, I’ve heard of people “massaging” dead pixels to get them to turn on or off… don’t know if it works or not. (My brother owns at least 2 of the Dell 2001FPs and really likes them. I believe that they’re currently one of the standards that Anandtech judges other monitors by. Also interesting is the Dell 2005FPW, which is also 20.1″ but is widescreen at 1680×1050 resolution.)
As for the smoking monitor, I point the blame squarely at tight pants… um… I mean blown capacitors. It sometimes just happens. I had a capacitor in my computer’s power supply blow a couple years ago. Nice loud pop followed by bluish acrid smoke. I think it actually kept working (hooray for redundancy hooray). Anyway, not necessarily the power strip’s fault.
By Adam on Mar 15, 2005 at 1:48 am
Whoa, that’s how Kristjan’s name is spelled!? That’s totally badass. You throw an umlaut in there and that’s definitely a name nobody is gonna mess with.
Can you imagine the phone conversations:
“Yes, that’s christian with a K and a J and one I…oh yeah and I almost forgot, an umlaut”
(Guy on the other end drops his phone)
By GV on Mar 15, 2005 at 10:38 am
Yes, the Christians of the world bow before me, Kristján Guðmundsson. Suck my greatness!
By KristjÃn GuÃmundsson on Mar 15, 2005 at 4:06 pm
So… umm… getting back to the original post a little bit…
I’m actually interested in impressions of (and model number) for the Dell monitor, since I have been considering getting one. Any comments, Jeff? How does it look?
By Adam on Mar 16, 2005 at 1:28 am
Sam’s model is the UltraSharp 1905FP, and I really like the way it looks. I fell in love with the Dell flat planel monitors back in my undergraduate days, when the mechanical engineering department at Texas put together a “high performance computing lab” (HPCL) with a bunch of Linux machines for higher-end computations than the Mathematica or Matlab jobs people would run in the more “traditional” computer lab. The HPCL had 19″ Dell flat panels, and they looked great back then (circa three years ago or so).
Sam’s model looks great, too. I bought a flat planel once for my personal computer at home (a no-name brand that I can’t remember), and I remember my big complaint being about the text underneath icons on my desktop. The text was fuzzy, and there was nothing I could do to fix the problem. So I returned it. With the Dell, everything is sharp, and combined with the aesthetics of modern flat planel displays, this thing is a winner.
By jjk on Mar 16, 2005 at 10:02 am