return to our irregular programming

This morning I found that my computer had updated itself overnight and was ready to reboot, but I had some peculiar trouble getting it started up. When I did, I found that the monitor kept blanking out for short, then increasingly long periods.

Concluding, as you would, that this meant the quite elderly monitor was failing, I had to set out and buy a new one. Using B's computer to search big box stores, I discovered that near-squarish 18 inch (diagonal) monitors like mine aren't being made any more. The smallest are 22 inch and they go up, way up, from there. That would make it a lot easier to be able to see two windows at once, which I often need to do. I settled for a 24-inch Samsung that I could pick up at a store not too distant. I drove there, walked in, found the box on the shelf, and bought it.

Not the end, since I still had to crawl around underneath my desk to disconnect the old monitor and connect the new one. The latter was particularly exasperating because it came with a cord that looked like a USB but wasn't, and wouldn't fit in my computer's USB ports, which are all of that kind that I have.

But the monitor did have one of those 15-pin ports that my old monitor had, and that would enable me to use the now-abandoned 15-pin port on my computer. All I needed was a cable. The new monitor didn't come with one. I couldn't use the old one as it was not separable from its monitor. Back to B's computer to locate a cable, order it for pickup, and drive to another, fortunately nearer, outlet to get it.

More struggles under the desk, and finally connection, succeeded by discovering that the monitor didn't know what kind of cable it was using and was reporting no signal on the non-USB cable. Nothing I could find in the online manuals said how to tell the monitor what kind of cable you were using, so I turned to Samsung online chat. After half an hour of wrangling over which of the various numbers stamped on the back of the monitor was the model number - it wasn't the one that said "Model No." next to it, and I'm just the customer, I'm not responsible for how Samsung labels its own numbers on its own products - I learned rather quickly that there's a button you can press that will toggle the input. That worked. One could wish this were more clearly stated somewhere, or that customer support could tell you this doubtlessly standard procedure without fussing over your exact model number.

Then I found that the monitor is still going blank occasionally. Clearly it's not just the monitor. I wondered what would happen if it blanked while I was watching a video - would the video stop during the blankness or keep going, and if the latter what about the sound? - only to discover that it won't go blank while a video is playing. So now, thanks to my wide monitor, I have one of those "ten hours of silence" videos running in a tiny window in the corner, and it's fine. That'll have to do until I take the computer in to the shop for a look, which I'm reluctant to do because you know this problem will never appear in the shop.

So, a day with no work getting done, but at least it egged me into getting a new and superior monitor.