A few months ago I bought a reasonably large, reasonably priced monitor. It's a Viewsonic VA2012wb, a Costco exclusive. It looks really imposing on my desktop, and the picture is sharp and nice. However.
When I first bought the monitor, I had it attached to a fairly crappy GeForce 5200, or maybe 5250; I'm not sure actually but it wasn't very good. It didn't support the 1680x1050 which is this monitor's native resolution (and it looked like utter crap at the lower resolutions and incorrect aspect ratios that the card did support). But Reuben was upgrading his computer and I was getting his oldish but better-than-mine parts. Score. Except.
With the new card, the fucking monitor would not work with the DVI port. At all. It would work on VGA, and the newer card did support the correct resolution, but only analog. Grr. So, I "exchanged" it--returned it and rebought it with the fat wad of cash they gave me--and the new one seemed to work perfectly on the DVI port. Until today.
Because it is hotter than hell in August right now, and we were having a lovely electrical storm, the power kept going off. My computer is, supposedly, plugged into a UPS (battery backup, really), so should have no trouble; despite the relative dinkiness of the UPS, the box assured me that it should be able to power the computer for a few mintues. My monitor, because of its impressive size, I plugged into the surge protector (non-battery) part of the UPS, thinking it would drain the UPS too quickly to power the screen and the computer. So the power goes out, the UPS beeps, but the computer, judging by the lights, stays on. Except the display stays off, indicating that it is not getting a signal. So I shut the computer off, and turn it back on. And the monitor refuses to turn on, just like the initial faulty monitor had. Bitch.
Except, as an experiment, and because I want to buy a new video card anyway, I plugged the monitor into the computer that lives in the music room, and the monitor worked just peachy. Peachily. Hmmmm. What if... nah. But. Well. What the hell. So I carry the monitor back in and hook it back up to my DVI port, and reboot the computer. And the monitor works again. So apparently, if and when (if or when? what a stupid phrase, actually) the monitor stops working again, I guess I'll just, like, unplug it for a couple minutes and plug it back in again. And when that stops working I'm going to RMA the fucker. Hopefully by that time this model will be discontinued and they'll be forced to give me a better one. Because fuck this shit.