I think my monitor is dying – 344 days old

[[ GK ]]

My Samsung SyncMaster 2493HM has been a great monitor since I bought it, I think roughly 5 years ago?

Anyway, last few days it suddenly refuses to power up from a cold start. The power LED comes on, but it flashes rapidly, like a couple times a second, and will not even let me turn it back off via the capacitive front panel switch. The first time it happened, I had left my desktop machine on overnight, and simply turned off the monitor when I went to bed. In the morning, it did the rapid LED flashing when turned on. I thought at first that maybe Windows had shit the bed during the night, and rebooting would make everything right. Not so. That made me wonder if my GTX-280 graphics card was the culprit. I even connected it to my laptop via HDMI, and the monitor still wouldn't wake. I turned the monitor off with the rear panel master switch, and went to work. When I came home, it worked fine. It has since repeated the rapid LED flashing and refusal to wake several more times. As I type this now, it's working fine.

When the monitor does fully turn on, everything looks normal. There's nothing else to indicate that it may be about to perform its swan song. The fact that it showed the same problem when connected to my laptop makes it almost certain that the monitor is the problem.

I love this monitor, and hate to think it's about to go tits up. I paid $500 for this thing. The upside is that even bigger monitors are less costly now. The downside is that the system driving it is getting on in years as well.

Any thoughts?

[ZemaTalon]

Sounds like it could be your monitor's powersupply - maybe a bad cap. Check out this video:

[[ GK ]]

Wow, cool video. Thanks Zema! I guess I'll have to bone up on my soldering skills.

[Fingerle]

Powers up. No backlight, or flickers then comes up after a couple min. Had a 20" model with that problem. Wound up being a couple bad caps. Fixed it. Ran it for a couple more years, it started screwing up again and go tossed. 24" Asus monitor for under $200 bucks. bye bye old Samsung. ROFL!

[ranchhand]

If it's bad caps you can solder in new ones yourself, it's not rocket science. I replaced 2 caps on my 40" Samsung TV/power supply board, and my sister-in-law's HP mobo had 4 bad caps I resoldered. $4 in new capacitors and an hour of time & its still running solid 6 months later.

[ZemaTalon]

So how did this turn out GK?

[[ GK ]]

I stopped using it. It's in the closet until I figure out what to do with it.