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Thanks for the replies everyone, I'm going to spend some quality time with this monitor tomorrow, test every cap I can and all the resistors too. The service manual looks like it will be very, very helpful, but I'm not even going to try and read it until I get to the library tomorrow and print the whole thing (51 Pages!). I feel really old saying this (no offense) but I don't like reading books/manuals/things of that nature on a computer screen..... can't stand it. It needs to be on paper for me to comprehend and understand it fully.
I would save up and get an LCD, but it's going to be at least 4 months before I can come up with the money to buy a decent one, and I want my huge monitor back ASAP. Plus all LCD's are chintzy, plasticy POS's IMO. Flimsy plastic stands and "Made In China" plastered all over the place. I was helping the computer guy at my school unpack some very nice new Dells, since the school is starting to replace all our old computers. I unboxed at least 30 LCD's and they felt so weak, you pushed the plastic on the back and it bent it.... on $200 monitors? That's unacceptable. They were 19" UltraSharps, which run about $230 each. My Trinitron on the other hand was made at the Sony Rancho Bernardo plant, 30 minutes away from where I live. It's a solid, heavy beast. The plastic is thick and heavy, you can treat it as roughly as you want without even remotely caring about damaging it, because you can't. They don't make quality like this anymore.
Any thoughts about why the neck board smells like urine? It's a foul smell that can only be described as urine, but I know for a fact it's not actually urine because it's JUST the neck board and the insides of the monitor were very clean, not even that much dust on the chassis. The only thing I can think of is that IC that has charred the PCB around it. Bad caps maybe? Last time I was in the monitor, about a week ago, I looked around for swelled/leaking caps, but found none. I guess this is going to take more than a visual inspection. Tomorrow I will search for bad resistors and resolder the entire chassis, see if that leads anywhere. The bad thing about this monitor is that I tried testing the caps on it with my multimeter, and they ALL read open. I'm going to have to remove them to get readings off them.... lots of work. I might buy a desoldering iron for this.
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