[X] My Assistant

[Nix]

The idea came up in another thread -people working on 'legacy monitors'.

How do you look at Mars?
So far I've used -in good 'ol Pathfinder times; a 15" old-timer and 22" old-timer, and now 17" and 19" crt's. The 19" died on me recently and will cost big $ for repair.
I think about Lacie 22" CRT/LCD now

What do you use - or drool over?

Nico

[dvandorn]

So, you know that rather low-end 17" LCD I mentioned last year, that I got about two and a quarter years ago, now, that I was liking a lot?

Well, I liked it pretty well, all the way until it died.

I was puttering around on my computer last weekend, playing Yahtzee, in fact. I had just rolled a Yahtzee when my screen just went black. I power cycled the monitor a couple of times, nothing happened. Rebooted the computer, nothing happened. Then the monitor powered itself off, and refused to power up again.

Well, I figured, I paid something like $260 for that monitor a couple of years ago, I ought to be able to find something a little bigger, maybe 19" or 20" diagonal, for the same price these days. So, later that same day, I went off looking at various stores around here to see what I could find, relatively cheap (it's not like I had budgeted to replace my monitor this month).

Went to Sam's Club, where you can often find quality stuff for low prices, and all they had were three sizes of a Samsung wide-screen monitor. The cheapest, a 17" diagonal, was around $170. I was tempted, since Samsung is one of the best brands out there, but I really wanted something a little larger, and I was really looking for a standard 4x3-ratio monitor, if I could find one.

Went to Target, they had four different sizes of a Westinghouse (the same brand that had just died on me, and that had suffered a slightly annoying amount of pixel burn-in along the static browser frame lines), with the cheapest running about $200. Again, they only had monitors in wide-screen format.

Then I went to a small franchise, MicroCenter, and they had some serious sales going on. They had a 20" diagonal for only $159... well, OK, $189 and a shot at a possibly-nonexistent $30 mail-in rebate. I ended up getting that.

But, once again, the only monitors they really had were in the wide-screen format, so I now have a 20" diagonal wide-screen LCD monitor. Acer brand, which isn't that bad a brand, I've worked with their hardware before.

I'm suddenly discovering what can be done with panoramic images as desktops...

The only drawback is that my graphics card isn't smart enough to deal with certain programs (mostly games) that are designed to operate full-screen in 4x3 ratio, so when they run on this monitor, they look all stretched out. And with only 128MB of video memory, while I *can* connect with a dvi cable and have the computer control the resolution modes (trying to achieve a 1:1 mode with those games I mentioned, to avoid the stretch), the card just can't handle the wide-screen very well in that mode. There is literally no way to get a screen resolution in that mode in which text and images aren't squeezed or stretched everywhere, and the games still insist on going full-screen, even when I fudge the scaling factors. So, for now, I'm connecting with a standard VGA cable and getting a beautiful image at 1280x800 pixel resolution.

Thinking about getting a new video card, though -- I figure a more capable card will be able to do more things. There are 512MB AGP cards (the most compatible with my data bus) out there for less than a hundred bucks...

Maybe next month.

-the other Doug