My Sony Trinitron died!!

I had a 15 inch Sony Trinitron 100 GS monitor for my workstation. Yesterday after booting the machine I noticed a little green key on the bottom left corner of the screen. After google'ing the problem Sony's suggestion was to send it in to the factory for repairs... Ya, right I was going to do that!!

So I went shopping and picked myself up a new monitor. A BenQ FP731.


BenQ FP731 Monitor

Being the cheap guy that I am, I went around to a couple of stores looking for deals. I went into the local BestBuy where there was a flyer special on a 17 inch NEC, but they didn't have any in stock!! It must have been one of those items that the business uses to try to get you to come visit the store in the hopes that you would buy something else.

After the BestBuy guy told me there were none in stock, I asked him what other monitors he had in stock and he told me to go and try FutureShop down the road. I guess he didn't want to sell me a monitor today. This is the first time I have had bad service here, better not continue if they want my money!

After all that, I picked up the BenQ (who ever they are) 17 inch monitor for $299 bucks... not a bad deal!! For the price, I think that it is a pretty good LCD monitor. I have surfed the Web, watched a DVD and booted to Fedora and WinXP and they both look great.

NOTE: When using Fedora Core 3, I selected the generic LCD monitor driver at 1280 X 1024 (supported by my Intel 845 chip) and it worked the first time. You can never know when configuring display drivers in Linux for integrated graphics cards what the result will be.

I'll try and update the site on what I think of the monitor so far.

F1Fan