Lawrence "The Dreamer" Chen's Blog

Link: http://sellout.woot.com/Blog/ViewEntry.aspx?Id=8227

A Vison 21.6” Widescreen LCD via sellout.woot.com

I had been thinking of getting a ~22" Widescreen LCD monitor for some time....I had a variety of rules of what it needed to be or should have. And, what price I would snap one up at.

Then I saw this monitor on sellout.woot.com, and most of the criteria went out....it was the right price, it had DVI input, it was about the right size and dimension. So, I snapped it up.

Then there was a seemingly long wait...considering that there were other items that I had acquired by Woot, before and after the monitor...and all those items have already arrived.

But, today I came home from work, and the monitor was sitting on my door step.

Hooking it up, I found that the supplied cables were rather short, which limited where I could place it. Then I discovered that my memory of my PC was flawed. The video card only has one DVI and one VGA output, I thought it a pair of DVI-I's....but I guess it was a DVI-I and a VGA. So, buying that DVI cable from TigerDirect was unnecessary....though I'm sure I'll find a use for DVI cable down the road. I remember thinking it was odd that I didn't have one already laying, which prompted me to order it (since reading the description, I noted that while it had DVI input...it didn't provide a DVI cable).

Then came trying to figure out the steps to get computer to detect new monitor, use new monitor and output 1680x1050 to it. I took a gamble and updated the video driver. Computer came back, so guess it worked.

Years ago, I had updated through Windows Update...and had to rollback in order to be able to boot. There had been other occasions where recovery was messier....so I was worried about doing that again. And, actually I probably didn't need to....

The new monitor doesn't look quite as good as the old Dell 1800FP, but that's probably the difference of DVI versus VGA...though some of it is also color tuning....and some might be aging.

But, I've started to customize things and now I'm going to stay with how things are.....

....at least until I decide what the next computer upgrade will be. Don't know if it'll be a new machine pre-installed with Windows 7 or a Mac....either way with an XP VM

Follow up:

The picture difference is less noticeable now that I've replaced the plain solid desktop background with a pretty dual monitor wallpaper image.