Hi. About a couple of months ago my Sony Vaio lcd monitor
(pcvd-17sd1w) was working fine. I was using it all day and in the
evening needed to restart my pc, so i did and when the monitor went to
come back on, it displayed only a white screen and nothing else(so now
instead of a monitor i have a rather expensive lamp). It displays
white whether it is plugged into the 3d card or not. It doesnt flash
white, just stays white.
I was wondering if anyone knew what could have caused this and if it is
perhaps fixable because i dont really want to buy a new monitor. I
have owned the monitor for about 6 months but bought it off a friend
who had it for a while, so unfortunately it is out of warranty.
Thanks
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gremlin_dude
I could be wrong but suspect you have a bad internal ribbon
cable contact, or the data board itself is failing in some
way.
Does it "always" display only white, or sometimes work ok?
The remedy might be opening it up and inspecting, trying to
find fault but if it works a lot of the time, you are adding
poential fault points by (doing what might come next to
troubleshoot...) opening it up, disassembling it to inspect
all parts... and we dont' know what abilities you have to
spot or fix faults.
So when you wrote "lcd monitor", I take it at face value,
that it is only a monitor, that at worst, you can buy
another monitor without suffering further loss. (not that
this isnt' enough of a loss, but compared to an entire
laptop being nonfunctional, it is the lesser of two evils).
I would disassemble, inspect, pull and replug all cables,
including ribbon cables. If you had a spare system-monitor
cable, that might be worth trying too. Beyond that, I
suggest buying a new 19" or higher monitor since the current
one is out of warranty.
you could also try the "i am a severely dissatisfied
customer" approach, phoning and emailing sony about how
upset you are. 9 times of out 10 it is just a waste of
time, but for the tenth person... it might help, and Sony
should be aware of this, that customers won't buy same brand
that just failed on them a large % of the time, and
personally, I don't feel a monitor should fail like this, at
least not until the CCFL lamp has aged until it is too dim
to be useable which is at least 4-6 years' use, even longer
in some cases.
So let them know, you didn't want to save $5 in parts to
reduce the lifespan by 50%. Often the key is not "asking"
them what they will do for you, but "tellling" them what you
insist to rectify this. remember that a Sony (et al) CSR is
not losing money out of pocket to fix your system, they
might take the path of least resistance, which is you vs.
their manager.
Set policies might make this irrelevant, but often Sony (at
least) has a reasonable warranty. Are you certain your
warranty is up, there is no way to take advantage of it?
If it is up, and you have the budget to buy a nice new LCD,
it might work out as well in the end. A reasonably good 19
or 20+" LCD is much nicer to use than a 17", IMO.
