About a month ago my giant monitor broke. The power light had been flickering for some time while turning on before it went bad.
I had owned the monitor for over 9 years, so I wasn’t that disappointed when it finally broke, but when I looked to buy a new one, I found that there were no good options for 4:3 ratio resolution monitors. They were all too expensive or smaller than my old one! All the new ones for sale are in widescreen (16:9), and I didn’t like that.
Any electronics guy will tell you that most problems with LCD monitors have to do with capacitors going bad. I opened up the monitor and saw that none of the caps looked burst or bent… shucks!
At this point, the monitor was not worth fixing it wasn’t the caps. Considering there were only about 10 caps, and the caps only cost about 10 cents each, I went for it. Caps don’t always have to burst or bend outward when they go bad.
The soldering for this job was a pain the ass. When repairing monitors, it’s important to keep track of where all the stuff you take out needs to be put back in. The same exact rated capacitors must be put back in (although it’s okay if the voltage rating is higher on the ones you put back in).
And guess what…
It worked!
Needless to say, if your monitor stops turning on and you know how to solder, it’s definitely worth replacing the capacitors.
Now I just hope this monitor lasts another 9 years.
