So I had my cab out of service for about 6 months while I was building a new system board with a spare mobo I happened to get my hands on.
I finally found the time to mount the board in the cab and fire everything up to test the mini-pac, monitor, speakers, etc.
The display came up pretty dim. I was perplexed. I was sure that things looked good on this monitor when I de-cased it and mounted it in the cabinet.
Suspecting it was the graphics card, I tried outputting my laptop signal to the monitor -- same result. Darker picture. I turned the brightness all the way up via the on-screen controls, but even at 100% it wasn't even close to acceptable.
What happened? Did the monitor crap out just sitting there for 6 months?
So I went to the chassis and inspected the flyback transformer. There were 3 adjustment pots there; the top 2 just made the screen various degrees of fuzzy -- most likely focus and maybe position. The 3rd knob HAD to be the magical 'screen' adjustment that I was looking for.
But the DAMN THING WAS GLUED DOWN. Seriously? They set it at the factory and glued it down? GRRRRRRRR
I hit it with a hair dryer for about 10 minutes, and took a deep breath, snapped on the vise grips, and gave a tug. *Snap!* The knob broke free. Just a hair's adjustment gave me the increase in brightness I needed to get my display happy again.
Let me tell you, after spending hours upon hours decasing, creating a custom mount for, and adjusting the final fit of this generic 19" CRT monitor, I was really not very excited about wrenching on the flyback adjustment. Especially since I had no idea how tough the glue would be.
Why do they glob these up with glue? 99% of monitor purchasers will never even de-case their monitor, let alone want/need to adjust any flyback pots. What's the use in gluing them?
/rant
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Topic: Brightening my no name 19" CRT PC monitor - a brief rant (Read 1179 times)
