Today without warning the 19" monitor on our home computer conked out. I checked and rechecked and it was just dead. Thinking I had to go get a new one I went to the HP website and searched for the monitor information in their forums. Found a link in one of the posts by an HP tech to some blog by an electrical engineer that took his apart and found that 3 capacitors costing about $1.75 each pop and just need to be replaced. Took mine apart and the exact same capacitors are popped (burst on the top with some dried fluid). Off to the local electronics store tomorrow to see if I can score some capacitors. Heck for the price of a monitor, they could be $25 each and still be ahead. I can only imagine how many of these LCD monitors are in the recycle bin for $9 worth of parts. Doesn't make sense, but we are supposed to go out and buy another one because even HP said " it costs more to repair it than replace it." Ya right!!!

 

Takes a lot of money to ship those broken monitors to India for repair.

Same kinda thing happened to my big screen. It took 100 bucks and a bout a half an hour to solder parts in. Good as new.

 

Post up the info when you get a chance for the rest of us 'future' repair persons.

 

I had to replace the IC chips and some resistors. I have an older toshiba Projection TV. It is actually a pretty common problem. The chips overheat, go bad and the resistors start to blow. I will see if I can find the website and the forum I went to.

 

Too bad there is nothing we can replace when the electronics on a VP44 go face down/bottom up.

I have a friend thats pretty good with electronics, he's taken newer items like tvs, printers, monitors, and such that people have thrown away and made them work again. He's replaced little parts you can but at an electronic supply store. He's got some nice stuff for cheap that way. It's sad our society has that attitude that if it breaks just throw it away and buy a new one without trying to fix it.

 

My dad used to be am electronics repair man. He'd go to peoples houses and it didn't matter what it was, he'd open it up, using a meter and a scope, figure it out, and replace a 10 cent part. He doesn't do that anymore, but I did get to learn a little from him, although not enough to do it on the level that he did. We worked together for a few years in a pc repair shop and we did this all day long with pc's, mac's, and monitors. Towards the end of it, it became either impossible to cross reference numbers and find suppliers for those 10 cent parts, or we simply weren't allowed to order them by the manufactures anymore. I have fixed alot of things around my house, like a dishwasher that got hit by lightning and burned a hole in a board, and we had a tv that would quit about once a year and it would burn a 10k resistor every time. I got a 5 pack and kept it going till we got a bigger one and gave old rusty away.

 

I had that happen to my 19" HP monitor. I went and bought a Samsung 23" high def monitor to replace it. Wish I had known then what you know now.

Thanks for the heads up.

 

Had a computer quit a few years ago. I opened it up and noticed a bunch of caps on the motherboard that did not look right. Checked on the internet and discovered that these caps were known to be defective from the manufacturer. Took a trip downtown to the electronics repair area here and found the exact same caps. It was a pain to remove them from the board, but changed them and bingo, the computer came back to life. Not bad for less than $15 and a few hours of my time.

Had a lawn sprinkler timer quit on me. Opened it up and noticed one resister was completely fried. Replaced it for a few pennies and everything worked again. I checked with the timer manufacturer (Rainbird) and they were really good to me. An engineer called me back and told me that particular resister was known to burn with a supply voltage surge.

So two electronic items repaired for only a few bucks. Sure beats going out and buying a new item. Repaired many other items very cheaply that others would throw out.

 

I was as the same point with mine, griping about having to buy a new one so soon.

I went out today and bought the caps at $0.58 each, 10 minutes to de-solder and solder the new ones in. BANGO works like new...

Here is the link...
http://boredprojects.blogspot.com/20...vs19d-fix.html

 

Lil Dog, I agree with you that there is more than a slight majority of society that needs to be thrown away and replaced with new parts.
The thread title made me do it.

 

thats fine if you can fix something yourself,if you have to find someplace local that fix something good luck,cheaper to throw it away.

 

read the first post and skipped to the end.

I have contributed to us being a throw away society.
a 20" HP LCD monitor goes for what $130??
Figure, on a $130 device, the average person will pay maybe 1/2 that amount to have it fixed. much more than that and they will replace it.
How long did it take you to figure out the capacitor was the issue? hour? two hours? Something obvious like that a tech could probably catch by opening the case and looking. Figure an hour to repair. but on a device that you can at best get $65 for the repair, you dont have much time to troubleshoot and repair a device.
The fun part is when you spend three hours to figure out thats its a proprietary chip that you can only purchase thru HP and its $50 plus shipping and handling and they will have it to you in a couple weeks.

 

Heck I had a 2 yr old Toshiba TV that quit on me and I was out $600. Took it to the repair shop and he said he couldn't get parts for those and might as well throw it away. I gave it to a guy and I'll be danged, he went inside it and found a blown fuse. Anyway, I'm deathly afraid to go inside a TV since I touched a capacitor with a screwdriver and did some nerve damage when I was 16.

 

ya gotta love the taste of burnt copper on the back of your tongue.
The only thing in a TV that scares me is that tube...

 

I guess I take it for granted that I have my own soldering equipment and build my own analyzer cables etc for my work tools. So for me it took 15 minutes on the internet forums from HP and about a good 20 minutes taking the monitor apart to diagnose. To those without the tools, I guess its really hard to justify. I just get angry when I have all this really expensive equipment on my new truck to help the environment, but we are supposed to just toss this thing into the garbage and get a new one from a foreign country...