Help! My monitor just died!

[A.I.]

I think my 17' CRT Viewmaster monitor has died. I'm receiving no picture and the green light is blinking. I also have an LCD monitor which I use as a dual screen. Fourtunately it's still working or else I wouldn't be typing this.

It happened when I was playing ePSXe. I noticed everytime I went full screen on my CRT it made this loud clicking noise and the resolution would change. It had been doing this sporadically for a while now, sometimes my monitor settings would change as well.

I am afraid that if I turn off my computer I may loose signal to my LCD TV and won't be able to get into my computer because I can't see anything. And I'm also afraid if I make the LCD my primary the computer will revert back to the old montior config and I have no picture. I'm getting a new LCD as soon as posible but in the mean time what should I do?

 

[MasterPhW]

You could try to change the settings and if it changes to a black screen, just wait 15 seconds and it should go back to normal, IIRC.
Good luck is the only thing I could wish you, because I don't have more ideas than this.

 

[A.I.]

You could try to change the settings and if it changes to a black screen, just wait 15 seconds and it should go back to normal, IIRC.
Good luck is the only thing I could wish you, because I don't have more ideas than this.

Yeah, thanks MasterPhW but it's OK I got my LCD monitor working again. I lost the signal before but I could still use safe mode to get in so I tried to access nivida control panel but it wouldn't let me so I then looked at ms help/support and found out windows will auto detect VGA device so I pulled out my CTR VGA pin and it detected my LCD on startup as the primary device. Hopefully I won't have any more problems with nvidia detecting it in the future.

I now have to quickly get new LCD monitor cos I'm typing sideways to see screen and it's killing my neck!

All the full windows openings and sudden change of resolutions must have killed my computer. Is CTR susceptible to this? I notice I dont hear the LCD making funny clicky noises when the resolution is changed.

 

[PsyMan]

The noise on CRTs is due to S-correction capacitor switching and it's normal.
LCDs don't do this cause... ehhh... well... cause they lack an electron beam.

 

[Cyberman]

LCDs also do not make this weird noise because they have a fixed resolution "What I can run VGA SVGA XGA" bla bla ...

LCDs have a device called an integrated scaler(click that to get an idea). This nice little device takes a digital or analog stream of data and in real time scales the data into something that is read from an internal buffer. So you could for example have a 640x480x24bit at 60hz bit display mode from your cheap display card feed into the VGA connector on the LCD and it would display without a glitch at 1280x1024x24bpp at 60hz. LCD panels can often be refreshed from 60hz to 150hz per frame without much difficulty.

A CRT however has different timing issues because the horizontal frequency is handled by a transformer generating very high voltage (25kv to 40kv) at medium frequencies (32khz to 96khz) that has a resonant frequency (called a fly back converter). This could be what has died in your CRT which means you won't be able to fix it, when you hear those clicks it's switching different resonant components to change things so the display CAN show data at the new resolution. Some newer CRT displays just use the LCD scaler component since it's cheaper to do that than play with the display frequencies now (it also makes the whole unit MUCH more reliable and safer IE less likely to BLOW UP).

Cyb

 

[A.I.]

Thank you Cyberman for the technical explanation. I was able to explain to my wife exactly what went wrong and why it can't be fixed. She is going to buy a 19' LCD monitor today which I saw on clearance for (Aus) $198.

Fingers crossed, there's one there. They have two left but they said they would put one out the back but you know sale pppl.