January 20, 2003
Testing...
Got an old monitor that's out of alignment? Then give Nokia's test pattern generator a try. I used it to tweak up the convergence on an old Hitachi monitor I picked up cheap. Granted, you have to pull off the back cover and stick your hands inside the guts of the monitor. If you're not comfortable with risking severe electrical shock then don't do it yourself. I ended up having to fiddle with not only the little potentiometers but I had to loosen and line up the yoke.
In picking up a pair of old P2/333's for a dualie Dell server that's been running on one processor, the seller didn't have the $10 change needed. He offered me a 19" IBM (hitachi) G200 monitor that had 'some color alignment' problems. I figured for $10 it was worth the gamble. Besides I've fixes this sort of thing before.
A little history is probably in order. When I was a kid we had black and white TVs that had tubes instead of solid state transistors. Being the enterprising kid I managed to collect old dead sets and swap/replace the tubes to get them to work. The nearby Read's drug store (for those of you that know Baltimore, this was up at the Northwood shopping center) had a machine that looked like a jukebox with dozens of sockets on top. You'd plug in your tubes and run the tester. Once you figured out what was dead they'd sell you a new one. It'd seem pretty strange to most folks today but it was par for the course way back when.
I can still recall watching them land on the moon while sitting in front of the family 19" black and white TV. It took them ages to get out of the lander! I figured they'd land, open the door and get out and walk around. It was hours before they got out. For a 5 year old kid that's like a lifetime!
When all the tube swapping failed to produce results I had to resort to the oscilloscope. I'm sure my mother, God rest her soul, would've had a fit if she'd seen me poking around arms deep inside a TV. Fortunately I lived to tell the tale. I do recall learning what ozone smelled like. That flyback sure had some kick!
So this time I found myself back in old familiar territory. Although TVs back then had about 6 screws on the cover. This monitor has no less than twenty of the damned things! About an hours worth of fiddling and voila, everything's back in perfect alignment. Well, it was a little more than an hour, I managed to crack a PCB while tilting the thing over. Fortunately only one trace and a ground plane got broken. A little soldering and it's back in business.
Not bad for a $10 buy! Now if only I could get my ancient Voodoo Banshee in the server to work at 1280x1024...
