Sergeant Solder

We starting having problems with it while Maya’s family was here. A couple of mornings the computer would wake up, but the monitor wouldn’t. If you shut the whole system down and leave it for twenty minutes or so and try again it would came back on fine. Weird. Well a day or so after they left it was nothing. No amount of waiting, jiggling cords, using different power cables made any difference. Luckily for us the discount TV we bought back in Florida has an in port for a computer’s video out. Of course, it is hard to sit that close to a television. Plus, what if one of us wanted Days of Our Lives at the same time the other wanted Tetrapod Zoology? It was just a temporary solution.

We were hemming and hawing about getting a new monitor. There's the cost plus the possibility that a new one would fail in short order as well. While searching for information about HP monitors and whether this is a common problem or not Matt found that, yes! it’s very common for the vs19e. Almost every site that mentioned them also mentioned “no power.” We even seem to have gotten more life out of ours than average. Our monitor is close to three years old. Most other people seem to have had problems in under twenty months!

The good news is that the most common problem is also really easy to fix! We learned all about it from gr8whtd0pe at instructables[dot]com. It has something to do with sub-standard capacitors in the circuitry. Namely, they bulge open, leak brown goo, and stop working. “All” you have to do is snap open the case, unscrew the circuit board, replace the faulty capacitors and you’re back in business. This does involve the use of a soldering iron to get the old parts off and the new ones on. Now, neither of us has ever soldered, but we have both “helped” our fathers do it. And of course by “help” we mean that we stood around blocking the light and asking silly questions of the guy with the 400 degree wand in his hand. How hard can it be right?

So, we headed on over to the nearest Radio Shack. We took the circuit board along because we had read that one person following gr8whtd0pe’s instructions actually got the parts store to do the soldering as a while-U-wait kind of thing. At the Radio Shack we went to it didn’t quite work that way. We walked in with the circuit board in hand and the clerks all dived behind the desk and hid. Well, maybe it wasn’t really like that. They pointed us in the direction of the parts bins and the rack of soldering supplies then stepped well away. Apparently, the fact that we had removed a circuit board from the inside of an LCD monitor was proof enough for them that we knew way more about it than they did. One of the guys claimed complete ignorance of circuitry, citing instead his MBA as qualification enough to run an electronics store.

If we had already had a soldering iron the repair would have cost us under five dollars. Since we had to buy an iron and solder and the new capacitors the repair was more like twenty-five dollars. Still, that’s not bad when a replacement monitor could easily have run us $150! The repair wasn’t that hard either. The hardest part was snapping the frame of the monitor apart to just get the process started. When we actually got to the soldering Matt held the iron and Maya applied the solder. We got better with each piece. We replaced three capacitors, screwed and snapped it all back together and the little blue power light came on! Great! We were quite pleased with our results. We love just doing it ourselves!