Monitor Issues

[lecmo]

I have a viewsonic E90fb 19" monitor.
Lately I've been experiencing a problem where everything appears grey and faded out. It's a little hard to explain but it's sort of like some placed a transparent tinted grey film over the front of my monitor. Oh, and extreme color contrasts in the screen put dark bars across it. This first happened to me about a year ago, but the problem fixed itself after about an hour or so, so I didnt give it any more thought. It's happened about 10 times since then but it usually fixes itself in under an hour. Though there was this one period last summer where it would go back and forth and it actually happened for a couple days...but then it fixed itself and didnt appear again for a few months. Unfortunately, it's happened again...and normally I'd just wait until it fixed itself again but it's been going on for over a week now...and I dont really know what to do.

 

[Techguru75]

Simply hook the monitor up to a different pc and see if it does it. If it does, then the monitor is going out. These things don't last forever unfortunately. Sadly, unless you're an electrical wizz, it's cheaper to just buy a new one most times than to have it worked on.

<shrugs>

If you can't plug it into a different pc, then take it to a local computer parts retail shop and ask them to hook it up to one of their test machines.

 

[lecmo]

I tried that before and it still had this problem. But don't you think if the monitor was dying it wouldnt be fixing itself over the course of an entire year. I mean....about a week ago the monitor was perfectly fine even though this "grey faded out" problem has occurred more than once in the past year.

 

[Techguru75]

So you hooked the monitor up to a different pc and it did the same thing?

 

[lecmo]

yes

 

[Techguru75]

Well, did you hook it up to a different pc with the same cable to the video card? You might want to replace that cable and see if you get lucky, otherwise, Newegg has some good prices.

 

[lecmo]

you think it could be the cable? I just don't understand why it was fixing itself before. I thought maybe there could be some kind of interference that I wasnt aware of...but I cant think of anything.

 

[Techguru75]

The only things that are going to interfere with your monitor are magnetic devices of substantial magnitude or other monitors. If you have another monitor sitting right next to this one, that could cause some distortion, but not a lot. The problems you are describing in your initial post indicate some sort of malfunction in the monitor. Is it going out....that is an objective point of view, some monitors do varying degrees of weirdness before they finally "poof." Some monitors just flat go out. Try the cord, if the problem persists, get another monitor and be done with it. That's my professional opinion.