My moniter--"Snap Crackle Pop"

[El_Brio]

I think my monitor is fuxored but want to check here before I send it off. Here are the symptoms:

1 at power up it "snap crackels and pops" for about a minute before it stops.

2 after this the picture SLLLOOOWWWLY comes up

3 when the windows 98 screen comes on, it is WAY off center and the top edge is compressed and brighter than the rest of the screen

4 at the end of boot up, when windows goes to set my desktop res. It resets.\

5 repeat steps 1-4 several times until desktop comes up.

6 desktop comes up, its darker than usual and is blurry

7 seems OK but bad pic quality at this point.
8 after about an hour of use, it slowly fades to black. (I can still hear stuff going on through the speakers though)


What I tried:

took out tnt2. Cleaned and replaced fan on tnt2 and CPU. -nothing

reinstalled video card drivers - nothing
installed different video card drivers -nothing

Reinstalled windows 98--(what a pain in the a*$) -nothing

bought voodoo3 and installed -nothing

took monitor to friends computer symptoms-

1. snap crackle and pop
2. windows load screen comes up compressed, top line blurred, off center
3. boots up and looked OK though. (a little dark)

what gives?? Do I need to call and get a new monitor?

PS snap crackle and pop never happened when I first got my monitor, then it got worse.

Monitor is about 8 months old.

What else could it be?
motherboard? Power issue? Processor?

Thanks for the help EL_Brio

[deep_sky]

is the monitor still under warranty? if it is contact the manufactur with no delay. I would also try not to use the monitor either. I saw another monitor doing the snap-crackle-pop thing and there was a burning smell of burning electronics coming from it after a while. It probably was on its way to blowing up, literally. So I would advise getting that thing replaced as soon as you can. The snap-crackle-pop thing is NOT good news.

[El_Brio]

It only does it for a few secs during startup....and it doesn't sound like a short or anything, just like static.

[Legoboy]

First thing I'd advise is to get in touch with the manufacturer and explain what is going on to them.

It's perfectly normal to hear your monitor do a little crackling when it's first switched on from cold. You'll also hear "clicking" when the resolution increases or decreases to any great extent. So going from a cold power on to Windows98 (at say 1024x768 resolution) you would first hear the crackling (as the gun and tube heats up) followed by a "click" as the Win98 splash screen is displayed, followed by probably another "click" when the splash screen vanishes and you see a few MSDOS things going on, then a final "click" as the relay fires in for your actual Windows98 display. As for the colour (or color for my American friends) being off and brightness a little on the dark side, these are both classic signs of a failing tube. Since it seems to have worked ok for 8 months and now you're experiencing these problems, I'd most definitely suspect the tube is on the way out.

Legoboy

[Axel]

Bottom line - it's not supposed to do that and the screen should be clear and correctly positioned on the monitor in 2 or 3 seconds. It's really unlikely that a video card would do what you describe to a monitor, but not out of the questin.

Only thing I'd do and try before contacting the manufacturer is to remove and magnetic and transformer sources well away from the monitor. speakers and printer power converters are typical culprits - refrigerator magnets and paperclip magnets are typical as well.

Next - pull out ye-ole-monitor manual and read whether or not it has a "degaus" feature - I.E. - de-magnetization of the internal components. - try de-gausing it before calling support to have the thing replaced.

If that doesn't solve the issue, you might also try the monitor on a different system to prove whether or not it might possibly be the video card ( again, I REALLY doubt it is)

If at last, the rice-crispy thing keeps happening, replace the monitor - it ain't normal......