A Few Inches Shorter

I come to you with a few less inches than I did yesterday.

Ahem.

Yesterday, my monitor of twenty-seven months up and died. I know I had it for twenty-seven months, because the warranty was only good for twenty-four months.

Back in October of 2008, I wrote a post about the I-INC 28″ Monitor. It wasn’t cheap — around $400 at the time, if I remember correctly, but it was very big, and I was very proud. What I quickly learned was, size isn’t everything — and when it comes to monitors, often quality prevails over quantity.

Within a few months, the I-INC had developed a single stuck pixel — one tiny little dot that, no matter what I did, stayed white. I tried massaging it with my thumb, and I tried viewing the YouTube videos that are supposedly supposed to “flash” the pixels into submission, but nothing worked. “Ah well,” I thought. After all, it was just one dead pixel among a vast sea of screen real estate.

Then, there were two. Then three, then four, and then five.

Last week, my monitor began randomly flashing on and off. It mostly seemed to happen when coming out of sleep mode, so eventually I disabled that. Being a good little tech, I tried isolating the problem down by swapping out cables and re-checking all my video connections. I even upgraded my video card’s driver, in hopes that that might alleviate the problem.

Last night, when the monitor would no longer power on, I knew where the problem lay. Where, problem. There, problem. There, castle. (Why are you talking that way? I thought you wanted to!)

TigerDirect only offers a 12 month warranty; I purchased an additional year on top of that, but unfortunately the monitor made it three months too long. I tried tracking down I-INC (who was either acquired by, merged with, or renamed themselves “Hansspree”), but that was of no use. It looks like I can mail the monitor back to them and, for around $100, they’ll take a look at it with no guarantee of a fix. Just when I thought that was bad news, I searched Google for I-INC won’t turn on and discovered that, sadly, I’m not alone. Some owners claim it’s a firmware issue, others say it could be a bad high-voltage transformer. I’m equally likely to fix either issue on my own …

And so, the I-INC has been officially removed from service. Unlike an old CRT monitor, dead flat screen monitors aren’t bulky enough to be used as a boat anchor, nor are they heavy enough to serve as a doorstop. It’s too big to blend, and won’t blow up like a tube monitor. Frankly, I can’t come up with a single interesting use for the thing. Tomorrow’s trash day, and it’ll probably go out in the dumpster.

The monitor was replaced with a 21″ flat screen Acer monitor from Walmart. It’s smaller than my old I-INC and the 24″ Dell monitors I have at work, but I’m sure it’ll work just fine.