Dead Pixel Society*

Yesterday morning I wiped the dust off my monitor with a damp cloth. A few minutes later I noticed a bright green dot 1/3 over from the right and about half way up while the screen saver was running. I run an adjusted version of Euphoria and the background is mostly black, so that bright green dot was very visible. It doesn’t get any better when I’m working either because I draw in AutoCAD with a black background and that green is the color I use for dimensions.

I Googled “dead pixel” and found a few places that offered methods to fix them. But the first thing I learned is I didn’t have a dead pixel, but I had a stuck pixel. *The title of this post wouldn’t have sounded near as cute if I used stuck instead of dead.

I tried two different software methods and maybe I didn’t let them run long enough, only about 15 minutes, but neither had any success. I then moved onto the more dangerous physical methods. The pencil point directly applied to the stuck pixel insulated by a couple sheets of paper fixed the problem, for about 2 minutes. Then we moved on to the tapping of the screen on the pixel with a Sharpie, with the cap on, this worked too. For about 15 minutes. By the afternoon I was coming to the realization that I was going to have to live with that one bright green spot and maybe change my AutoCAD background to white.

At the 2 o’clock break, with the usual gang gathered in my cube, I was regaling folks with my attempts to fix the stuck pixel. As I was demonstrating the tapping technique that had worked for the relatively longest time, I picked a random spot on the screen and practiced hitting it with the right pressure, just enough to make a nice white halo around the cap of the Sharpie, when my stuck pixel unstuck. I was about 4 or 5 inches away from it, but on the second or third tap it winked off. Hasn’t returned since.