Another Sad Dell Monitor Story
Dell, you continue to disappoint me, but I keep coming back for more. Perhaps it’s because I know that when you do get it right, you really get it right. Remember those three 24″ wide screen monitors I ordered? They arrived on the 27th, the same day as the Velocity Micro MCE system, and late in the afternoon (after I swallowed the bitter disappointment of the busted-up computer), I thought I’d cheer myself up by setting up the new Dell monitors. With Ashley’s help unpacking, I set up the first one and braced myself, fearful of seeing the colour banding problem again. I ran the colour spectrum test and it came up clean – no banding at all. I was elated…uh, wait a second, what’s what? A stuck pixel. I ran a few more solid colour tests, and sure enough, there was one stuck pixel. Ok, scratch that monitor – what made it more complex was that I couldn’t return just one monitor as part of Dell’s 15 day “no questions asked” return policy. I thought I’d figure it out later. Then I hooked up the next one – another stuck pixel. Wow. Ashley unpacked the third one, and said something was strange – it was missing the manual and looked like it had been re-packed. Sure enough, the screen had fingerprints on it. And the LCD panel looked a bit odd. I powered it up and ran the colour spectrum test…and here’s what I saw:
That, dear friends, is a broken/cracked LCD panel with liquid crystal seeping out.
Posts
January 1st, 2007 at 5:02 pm
Wow. I’m really surprised, I have a 2407 and it’s flawless. Of course, go try and find the driver .inf files at their website and call me a few days later to let me know if you were successful. I really hate Dell’s support site! You can’t do ANYTHING relating to support without a service code, and of course monitors don’t have one.
Neil
January 1st, 2007 at 10:27 pm
Phew, talk about bad luck! I sure hope the replacements are better than the first set. I’ve had my 2007WFP for about six months, and it’s spectacular.
Just in the last few weeks though, I’ve had some rather odd problems with display issues on it from my Vista PC. Just to be safe, I ran the (very handy) CheckeMON tool you linked to, and was panicking for a few minutes when I saw specks all over my monitor. It seemed that I had dozens of dead/stuck pixels. Eventually (okay, after a couple of minutes) I thought to run CheckeMON on my laptop, connected via VGA to the 2007WFP (I love that the monitor supports so many inputs). Luckily, the results were perfect there. I saw no signs of dead/stuck pixels over VGA.
So now I’m assuming the problems I’ve seen from my Vista PC (DVI) are caused by bad drivers. I am running Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit (RTM), but the latest drivers I can find from NVidia are beta drivers for Vista RC2. Speaking of drivers, I completely agree with Neil about Dell’s support site. The closest thing I could find to driver for my 2007WFP was for the A00 firmware. I went ahead and installed it, but really don’t notice any difference.
I look forward to reading the successful workings of your new monitors in the next few days. I can’t imagine what your setup will look like, but if it’s half as good as aroma’s, I’ll be impressed.
Happy New Year!
January 1st, 2007 at 11:13 pm
Monitors don’t have service tags, true, but when I’ve called in I’ve for monitor tech support/warranty issues in the past, I’ve given them my order number and that has done the trick. Give it a try! And don’t the monitors come with the INF file on the CD?
January 1st, 2007 at 11:50 pm
[...] As the saying goes, when it rains it pours. In the past 45 days, I’ve had one hard drive fail, had a trashed computer show up at my door, and had three defective Dell monitors come my way. Those three things are irritating, but not show-stoppers, because they didn’t impact the technology I currently have in place. Yesterday, something else happened that really made the other things seem insignificant. Sunday afternoon I put in the DVD for Titan’s Quest to play an online game with my friend Tim who’s out in London, Ontario. The game booted up, I created a game, then started checking the game quests since I hadn’t played in a couple of weeks. My cursor suddenly froze and the game locked up – I raised an eyebrow, wiggled the mouse a bit to confirm that it was locked up, then waited. It didn’t un-freeze, so I was thinking a video driver crash. I pressed ALT+F4 to kill the game. Nothing happened. I pressed CONTROL+ALT+DELETE to bring up the Task Manager. Nothing happened. I waited another 30 seconds to see if the CPU was going to acknowledge the keystrokes, then punched the reset button on the Shuttle SD11G5. Nothing happened. At this point my other eyebrow raised, because now I was seeing a hardware malfunction. I press and held the power button – again, nothing. Getting a bit more concerned, I pulled the power cable from the back of the unit. I waited about 10 seconds, plugged it back in, then booted up the machine. I breathed a sigh of relief when the machine booted up, but when I saw that the BIOS boot text was partially purple, I knew something was very wrong. [...]
January 2nd, 2007 at 7:07 am
You have had the worst luck with monitors. I’m glad you keep trying though, because I think the UltraSharps are worth it. In the past couple of years I’ve had two 19″, four 20″, one 24″, and two 30″ Dell UltraSharps and have been very please with each of them.
January 4th, 2007 at 8:57 pm
[...] My heart is pounding, my throat is dry, my palms are sweaty…no, I’m not looking at one of those Web sites. I’m setting up and testing out the three Dell 24″ LCD monitors that showed up today. For those keeping score, I just went through this last week, so I’m feeling a bit pessimistic about whether or not this is going to work out. Drummer, start that drum roll… [...]