773
90s kids will know
(lemmy.ml)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2025
773 points (98.6% liked)
Funny
9316 readers
1512 users here now
General rules:
- Be kind.
- All posts must make an attempt to be funny.
- Obey the general sh.itjust.works instance rules.
- No politics or political figures. There are plenty of other politics communities to choose from.
- Don't post anything grotesque or potentially illegal. Examples include pornography, gore, animal cruelty, inappropriate jokes involving kids, etc.
Exceptions may be made at the discretion of the mods.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
In college, a friend of mine had a TV whose picture would mess up every so often, and the solution was to take it in the hallway and drag up and then back down the hall by the power cord. Then, when set up again, it would work again.
There was never an explanation, that I know of, for why. Presumably there was some simpler method that would have achieved the same result but no one was interested in that.
Also in college, I had a "gaming" CRT that I refused to let die. Towards the end of it's life, it wouldn't turn on if the temperature got too low. But would work fine if I "preheated" it in the oven. Once it was on it would stay on.
It rocked on nearly a year like that until I decided to smoke a bowl while it warmed up and came back to monitor shaped blob.
How big is your oven?
I doubt it was anything special. But I did have to put the rack all the way to the bottom and lay it screen down. Was a Dell branded 21" trinitron IIRC.
I don't doubt you, but thats a big oven. Im kinda curious after the story of who found out that the oven fixed it :p
Well I didn't start out putting it in the oven. I just noticed on cold days, it took a really long time to turn on. But when it was hot, it worked normal.
Eventually it got worse and wouldn't come on at all. So I tried warming up the insides with a hair drier, and it worked. It took a long time, but as long as I kept the monitor on, it would keep working fine.
Then the hair dried died. And it was a weekend off of work. I'll be damned if I give up that prime gaming time. So I chukked that puppy in the oven and set it as low as it would go (I think it was like 250). Once the preheat timer went off, I pulled out the monitor, ran it to my PC and fired it up. Worked instantly, and was way faster than a hairdryer.
Lather, rinse, repeat until the inevitable happened.
Great story, glad you shared that. Epic tale of human inventiveness!
Approximately CRT sized
CRT? You were probably generating enough static electricity to do the electron realignment thing that they usually have a button to do.
THUNK
Woooomwmwmwmwmwmwmmmmm clear picture
CRT, yes. I really hope that static electricity was the explanation honestly. I sort of always assumed that it was just tilting it forward jiggled something around back into place, something stupid like that, but they swore that was the only thing that worked. It would please me greatly to think that they were right and the dragging across carpet was actually a vital component that they had figured out.
Our old CRT tv would all of a sudden go full volume at random and the only way to fix it to go back to a normal volume level was to smack the side of the tv.
I owned a computer for a while for which the standard startup procedure involved smacking it hard on the top to make sure everything was seated right.
Back then everything was made of metal, and it was an ugly white color, and we hit our computers if they weren't doing what we wanted. We all knew what our ports and IRQs were. It was great days.
As someone whose job it was to fix other people's computers when they borked the IRQs, before the days of drivers being widely available online... I can't say it was all that fun from my end.