I Can See! I Can See!
Yeah, so two new LCDs showed up today. They didn't have my name on the box, but they were ordered for me. I had no idea how fuzzy my CRTs were until I plugged these bad boys in. The viewable area is just a tiny bit larger, and I'm running at the same resolution, but the improvement is much more than I could've hoped. Between the crispness and the brightness, I felt an unusual surge of power. The first phrase that sprang to mind was "Bow before me, puny mortals!". I only say that because I don't know of anyone else in the building with 1600x1200 LCDs. Everyone else is happy with 1280x1024, but I am the King of Pixels!
Hooking them up was something of a disaster. It isn't sufficiently obvious to me which way the power connector is supposed to connect to the display. It's a little bit like an S-Video connector in that it's round and has four pins. Unfortunately, the pins aren't arranged in a way that makes the orientation of the connector immediately obvious. I was able to plug them in backwards. This immediately caused the power brick to shut down. I tried different combinations of power brick, power plug, wall outlet, and LCD. Almost always, the same result: the power brick light would go out as soon as the LCD was connected. I was getting really frustrated by this, especially since I'd managed at one point to get one of the displays powered up. Why not now? Even co-worker Jay came over, looked at them, and plugged them in the same way I had. I probably lost about an hour to figuring that out. On the bright side, even forcing the plugs in backwards didn't cause the LCDs or the bricks to fry.
In order to get the new displays, I had to move the old ones. I combined the removal of my old monitors with several other equipment moves. I was in a hurry to make all of this happen, with the unfortunate result that I neglected to shut down my computer before I unplugged the CRTs. This would come back to bite me later: the video card was running at a refresh rate that the LCDs couldn't handle, so I couldn't get a display at all. I was forced to remotely trigger a shutdown, meaning I lost an awful lot of state. Sigh. On reboot, though, it was definitely worth it. Woo hoo!
Hooking them up was something of a disaster. It isn't sufficiently obvious to me which way the power connector is supposed to connect to the display. It's a little bit like an S-Video connector in that it's round and has four pins. Unfortunately, the pins aren't arranged in a way that makes the orientation of the connector immediately obvious. I was able to plug them in backwards. This immediately caused the power brick to shut down. I tried different combinations of power brick, power plug, wall outlet, and LCD. Almost always, the same result: the power brick light would go out as soon as the LCD was connected. I was getting really frustrated by this, especially since I'd managed at one point to get one of the displays powered up. Why not now? Even co-worker Jay came over, looked at them, and plugged them in the same way I had. I probably lost about an hour to figuring that out. On the bright side, even forcing the plugs in backwards didn't cause the LCDs or the bricks to fry.
In order to get the new displays, I had to move the old ones. I combined the removal of my old monitors with several other equipment moves. I was in a hurry to make all of this happen, with the unfortunate result that I neglected to shut down my computer before I unplugged the CRTs. This would come back to bite me later: the video card was running at a refresh rate that the LCDs couldn't handle, so I couldn't get a display at all. I was forced to remotely trigger a shutdown, meaning I lost an awful lot of state. Sigh. On reboot, though, it was definitely worth it. Woo hoo!