I think my monitor just died

[Patrick]

I had a three monitor setup, all Asus. Two were the same model (V223w), and one was a different model (AL2216W). The AL2216W was really old, I'm talking at least seven years old. These others are only two/three years old.

Anyway, I was shutting down for the night and turned my monitors off. As I was getting ready for bed I forgot to do something so I booted back up. When I got to the Windows 8 login screen, my center monitor (AL2216W) would only show picture for one second and then go black. It wouldn't go to standby though, it'd stay green. I thought maybe Windows bugged and messed up my graphics settings and set something too high, etc, so I tried booting to the BIOS. No picture. I tried safe mode, no picture. I thought maybe my DVI cable was bad so I swapped the HDMI cable from one of the monitors to it, and the same one second picture > black thing happens.

I know next to nothing about monitors, but if it's my guess, something regarding the LCD is bad? I'm pretty bummed although I'm not sure what to expect from a 7+ year old monitor.

 

[Patrick]

Some searching leads me to this being known as '2 seconds to black'. Supposedly I can shine a flashlight on the screen and see my desktop! I haven't tried that, but that's funny. It's fixable, but I have little to no electrical skills and have never soldered anything in my life. I think I'll pass and lay this monitor in its well earned grave.

 

[Tekno Venus]

If you can see the screen when you shine a torch at it, then the LCD driver board (also called an Inverter) has probably died.

I had a similar issue here (although replacing the inverter didn't actually fix that): https://www.sysnative.com/forums/hardware/10836-laptop-backlight-broken.html. My computing teacher also bought his monitor into school the other day and was putting it back together during our lesson after getting the Electronics teacher to solder a new inverter in!

 

[Patrick]

If I can repair it, I'll use it. It worked absolutely fine until this happened out-of-the-blue. It didn't show any signs of failure such as black spots, flashes, etc. It just died randomly after working perfectly fine. I can't say I am surprised given I see this stuff happen everyday with the threads I am :grin1:

 

[Jared]

Out-of-the-blue :lolg:
I see what you did there. I found it!

 

[Patrick]

Caught red (blue?) handed!

 

[Jared]

Hmm...
You're like my driving instructor...
He comes out with all these really cheesy jokes.

He said that when he took his driving test they used to ask you random questions at the end; so one of the questions was "When you're at the traffic lights, what colour comes after green?".
He said "I don't know"
So the instructor said "What do you mean?"
He replied "Well I'm already gone by then."

:doh: :doh: :doh: :doh:

 

[Digerati]

Supposedly I can shine a flashlight on the screen and see my desktop! I haven't tried that, but that's funny.

If you can see the screen when you shine a torch at it, then the LCD driver board (also called an Inverter) has probably died.

The flashlight/torch trick only checks to see if the monitor's backlighting has failed. If you can see a faint Desktop display, then as T V noted, the inverter and/or the CCFL (cold-cathode florescent lamp) has failed. I generally replace both at the same time.

Note you don't have inverters or CCFLs on LED backlit LCD monitors.

If me, I would connect that suspect monitor to another computer and see what happens. If the monitor works fine on computer #2, you know the monitor is good. If it does not work fine, you have a problem in computer #1 or its graphics solution somewhere.