monitor going bad??

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babygrand

I have a 20" Dell CRT that is about 3 years old, has been a great high end
display until recently. I am running a Radeon 9600 AGP card in a Dell
Dimension 8200, 2 Ghz Pentium 4, 1 Gb RAM, everything has been great until
about 3 months ago, I noticed faint diagonal lines running from upper right
down to lower left, about 2" apart. I have tried changing refresh rates,
screen resolutions, everything, and nothing seems to make it go away. These
lines even appear when the machine is first booted up, when the very first
images appear, before any kind of video drivers are loaded.

Does this sound like a monitor hardware failure starting to develop? Is
there anything I can do about this, any hardware tweaks inside the monitor
itself? I have several video diagnostic tools, and they all run fine, and
indicate no driver or card problems.

Any thoughts or suggestions? TIA

babygrand
 
babygrand said:
I have a 20" Dell CRT that is about 3 years old, has been a great high end
display until recently. I am running a Radeon 9600 AGP card in a Dell
Dimension 8200, 2 Ghz Pentium 4, 1 Gb RAM, everything has been great until
about 3 months ago, I noticed faint diagonal lines running from upper right
down to lower left, about 2" apart. I have tried changing refresh rates,
screen resolutions, everything, and nothing seems to make it go away. These
lines even appear when the machine is first booted up, when the very first
images appear, before any kind of video drivers are loaded.
Click to expand...

Have you tried adjusting the "brightness" control? If turning down
the brightness doesn't eliminate these (what you are seeing are the
horizontal scans which occur during the vertical retrace period), then
there IS a problem in the monitor in that it is not blanking these
lines.

Bob M.
 
Well, I finally stumbled across what seems to have fixed it. After trying
to fiddle with every adjustment on the monitor's front panel menu buttons, I
finally looked at the last menu choice, which included color temperature and
something called "color return". Just out of curiosity, having tried
adjusting brightness, contrast, and about every other choice available, I
tried "color return", not having the faintest idea what that is. Well, the
screen went dark for a few seconds while I thought "oh s**t, what have I
done now?". Then it popped back on, and the faint little diagonal lines
were gone (at least for now). Not sure what that might have changed, but it
seems to be fixed. Hopes this helps another poor soul with the same
problem.

babygrand
 
Well, I finally stumbled across what seems to have fixed it. After trying
to fiddle with every adjustment on the monitor's front panel menu buttons, I
finally looked at the last menu choice, which included color temperature and
something called "color return". Just out of curiosity, having tried
adjusting brightness, contrast, and about every other choice available, I
tried "color return", not having the faintest idea what that is. Well, the
screen went dark for a few seconds while I thought "oh s**t, what have I
done now?". Then it popped back on, and the faint little diagonal lines
were gone (at least for now). Not sure what that might have changed, but it
seems to be fixed. Hopes this helps another poor soul with the same
problem.
Click to expand...

Found this in:
http://docs.us.dell.com/support/edocs/monitors/p1110/En/controls.htm

COLOR RETURN:

The colors of most display monitors tend to gradually lose brilliance over
several years of service. The COLOR RETURN feature found in the EASY
and sRGB menus allows you to restore the color to the original factory
quality levels.

Press (up) or (down) to select (COLOR RETURN).

(--->) restores the color.

The picture disappears while the color is being restored (about 2 seconds).
After the color is restored, the picture reappears on the screen again.

NOTE: If AVAILABLE AFTER WARM UP appears on the screen,
see Troubleshooting.

NOTE: The monitor may gradually lose its ability to perform this function due
to the natural aging of the picture tube.
 
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