My What A Big Eye You Have

This afternoon Donna came in to use the computer and was greeting by nothing, She shouted to me, “When did you turn this off?” “I didn’t,” I replied.

Earlier in the week we both had been experiencing random brief blank screens. I figured it was either the monitor or the video card. Thinking maybe the card was over heating, on Thursday I got out the vacuum and sucked a couple pounds of dust out of the case. For the next two days we didn’t have any black outs, so I though maybe that was the problem. Until today.

The monitor’s power light wasn’t even on, but I went and got the laptop and hooked up it’s external VGA port with the monitor cable and was greeted by the same nothingness. The monitor was a goner.

In our Fair City if you need computer bits you have two choices, Walmart or Staples. Staples is a 1/2 mile closer, so off we went. They have about 5 choices in our price and size range and I picked one out. Off the associate went into the back room to retrieve it. About 5 minutes later she came back out empty handed, “Sorry we don’t have one.” “How about this one?”, I asked pointing at the runner up. Less than a minute later she emerged from the back victorious.

Back home I plugged it up, flipped the switch and was greeted by a horizontally stretched desktop. I went to set the video to the native resolution of the LCD and I couldn’t, the numbers didn’t go that high. Crap, am I going to have to go back to the store and buy a new video card? Let me see if I can update the driver first. Must be be my lucky day, a 20 meg download later and I am staring at a shiny Samsung SyncMaster 2233SW in all its 1920 x 1080 goodness.