Since I got my new monitor, I have been wondering how to give the old one (the 17″ one with the brightness problem) what has been coming to it for exactly ten years. (It was manufactured in December 1996!) Last Saturday night I decided to pull the permanently-embedded VGA cable out of it and try to embed it into my other 17 inch monitor that has been without its embedded cable for two years. Everything related to getting the cable out of there went fine - I know what’s dangerous and what’s OK to touch inside of a monitor - until it came to actually removing the cable from the monitor’s plastic case. By this time I had removed the cable from the PCB and the only thing keeping it in place was the plastic case. I pulled out my pocketknife and proceeded to begin hacking away at the case. Of course, the knife slipped and hit my left hand - hard. You can guess the rest, since it was already at least midnight and I was pretty tired.

At first I thought it would take stitches - by now it looks like it’s starting to heal. I was able to get the stupid cable out of the monitor case by just taking a hammer to it - heck, I’m gonna be shipping the monitor to the recycling center anyways, so why do a clean job when I can just outright destroy it?

Those of you who saw the old picture of my setup down here should know that it is now officially outdated. Today I decided that I had had enough of my 13.4″ monitor, which I’ve been running at 1280×960. OK, so it was a dualmon setup. The other monitor was a 17″ screen with a serious brightness defect. I mean serious. The thing was so dark it wouldn’t even work as a night light. And being a graphics designer, you know I can’t stand that.

So I went on eBay. And craigslist. And I looked. And looked. And looked. For days. Nothing that fits my tight budget and my quality standards.

Of course, this is the Internet we’re talking about. I had to get lucky sometime. And I did. Boy did I ever! I found a ViewSonic A90 CRT monitor 20 minutes from where I live. And the Buy it Now price was $25! So I got a top-of-the-line, $250 monitor for approximately 10% of the original price. It really is a beauty too - I actually had to turn down the brightness, and I can read the text on the screen so much easier now that I have 18 inches to do it with. Sorry for the sales pitch folks, but really, you have not used a computer until you’ve used one with 19 inches of screen space. If you’re in the market for a monitor and you have desk space to spare, you should definitely consider something at least 19 inches in size, it is worth the price by far.