See that blue dot? That’s a dead pixel. And that’s a dead pixel on one of my three new Dell 24″ LCD 2407WFP monitors. The same monitors that I declared were perfect after my long struggle with trying to get three proper monitors. For the record, I’ve ordered 11 monitors, spent $8465.16, and waited five months to finish the seemingly simple task of getting three Dell LCD monitors that didn’t have dead or stuck pixels. A few weeks ago I thought the Sisyphian task was completed, but today upon seeing that stuck pixel I knew I wasn’t. I’m about a week over my 30 day return policy with Dell, so I can’t take the route I took previously of returning the monitor and ordering another one. I am going to give up and accept the stuck pixel? Absolutely not. I remain convinced that if a Dell customer such as myself is willing to spend $2300+ on monitors, they shouldn’t have to accept flaws products - and a monitor that developers a stuck pixel after being active for less than a week (I just set up two of the monitors last weekend) is indeed a flawed product.

I have a vague memory of  a Sesame Street skit with Bert and Ernie, where Ernie put the peanut butter into the cookie jar, and the cookies in the sugar jar, then the suger into the fish bowl, and the fish into the…whatever. You get the idea - swapping things around to make space, but you always end up with something that needs to go someplace else.

Last weekend I spent the majority of Saturday and Sunday working on the PCs in my office. I’ll write up a different post about the Velocity Micro PC (yes, it’s finally working), but it was the piece of the puzzle that was missing (like a cookie jar). I couldn’t do anything with my machines until it was working properly - oh, and that XFX 7600GS video card that I was waiting for as well. Once I started tearing down my PCs to put Vista on them, I also decided to swap parts around to get the best performance where I needed it the most. That meant taking the XFX 7600GS video card (passively cooled, totally silent) and 2 GB of Kingston RAM from my main workstation (a Shuttle SD11G5) and putting them into the Velocity Micro machine, taking the 2 GB of high-performance RAM and high-performance ATI Radeon 1950 from the Velocity Micro and putting them in the Shuttle SD11G5. Why? Well, the Velocity Micro PC is going to be serving as my TV recording/music storage PC, so it didn’t need either the high-performance RAM or video card - it’s hooked up to a Dell 26″ LCD TV that is no good for gaming. Swap one complete.

Then I had a medium-sized tower PC that I was using to test Vista on, recently wiping the hard drive to install the Windows Home Server beta on it. This PC had a 3.2 Ghz Celeron CPU in it (overclocked to 3.4 Ghz if memory serves), 1 GB of RAM, a 120 GB hard drive, and a Radeon 9600 GPU. Fine for testing Vista with (even with Aero Glass), but overkill for Windows Home Server. Then I had a Shuttle SN95G5 machine that I had been using as my Windows Media Center 2005 PC for the past couple of years. Great machine, and with the Velocity Micro now taking over that role, I was going to use it as a dedicated photo/video/audio editing workstation (my 17″ Fujitsu laptop just wasn’t cutting it). One of the three Dell 24″ LCD monitors I purchased was also going to be dedicated to this task. Unfortunately when I started to install Vista on the SN95G5, I was seeing it hang at boot. I poked around in the BIOS, but couldn’t solve the problem, so I dropped Shuttle tech support a line. Turns out the AMD 64 X2 4400+ CPU I had put in there last year wasn’t fully compatible with the motherboard - it would work fine in Windows (it had been working great) but the system would have trouble booting with it in (well that explains a few things). (more…)