It has been a little over two weeks since I got my new monitor (Sceptre X20), and I have good and bad things to say about it. I got it about an hour after my last post, hooked it up, scanned for dead pixels, and started running videos and pictures to see the difference in contrast. I had no dead pixels, which was a relief, but I really was not impressed with the quality of the picture itself. That is to say, it was still good, but I had kind of been expecting to need a tissue (for the tears of course). A quick run to RadioShack to pick up a $100 Monster DVI cable that had been marked down to less that $10 (you know, how much it is probably worth) and I tried again. The difference was amazing. I had some trouble believing how much the picture improved...so I switched back to vga again, and then quickly back. I was convinced that vga was dead to me.
So, a few days went by, and problems started popping up. I am a computer on all the time kind of guy (should that be hyphenated?). I do, however, shut off the monitor and the speakers. Now the problems arose when I would come back the next day and turned the monitor on. No signal. YAY! At first I paniced and thought the monitor died. I shut everything down, checked connections, and brought everything back up, and it worked fine. I played with it and nothing popped up as a problem, so I just assumed that the computer locked up, and went about my day. Yeah, it kept happening. I started looking the issue up, and at first it looked like a common issue with this monitor. Some more research made the issue seem far more widespread, and basically narrowed it down to an incompatability between older video cards and DVI. Not technically a problem with the monitor, but one that would not have been discovered had it not been for the purchase.
A quick fix would be to get a new video card or to leave the monitor on. There are 3 things I won't upgrade on my current computer: memory, processor, and video card. There words sum up my reasoning: end of life. My computer is old, not horribly old, but old. The motherboard needs to be upgraded before these other three integral components are upgraded. And since I have no plans on getting a new motherboard anytime soon, I will just leave my monitor on...unless I am shutting down my computer.
