I Just Got Flashed!

It was colourful.

A few years ago I'd had it with my laptop. The lid hinges seized and ones side actually broke when I just opened the lid as normal, a piece of plastic that had probaly been flexed over and over finally gave up the fight, and a few more internal bits (by the sound of it) followed suit. A LOT of bits. Couldn't repair that so I taped it in the open position, after which the keyboard started playing up because we live in a dusty environment. 

Also my eyesight has been slowly declining and we held a war meeting. We couldn't and still can't afford top replace a laptop (which was also going slower and slower as Windows got bigger and more resource-intensive) but we could afford a low-end monitor and the HP-24o won that deal by coming on special at Officeworks around that time. 

As you may guess by that link being to a troubleshooting page, yesterday I noticed that every time the imags stayed static on-screen for any length of time, the monitor would bust out this move where it flashed solid screens of colour, red, green, and blue, over and over. Worse, it seemed I'd forgotten how to access the menu. (I hadn't BTW. The plot thickens...) But the Input Select menu could be called up. 

At the same time, AliExpress had a special on 240Gb SSDs and so I (very gingerly!) replaced the SSD and made a mover arm for the monitor I could also set my wireless keyboard and mouse on. It's all a bit of a kludge but it can do the web and crawl through running Arduino IDE and Cura for slicing 3D prints. 

Here's my setup

I've redacted the background - this is our loungeroom after all.

The monitor's on a piece of melamine-covered chipboard which is mounted on a slight angle on a TV-mover type arm which is attached to the table the laptop's on. It dodgy af but it means I can use the system as a (grudging, creaking, slow) dual monitor system as long as I run large fonts. Also the speed hit is noticeable so I rarely use it in DM mode. But back to the weird fault.

Why? Why me? Why my monitor? 

It turns out that HP monitors have a factory-use-only setting and mine had decided it was back in the factory. That took all of a 30 second DDG (DuckDuckGo) to find. Sometimes, updated drivers were (apparently, I'm not so sure they could be) supposedly to blame, sometimes a power bump, sometimes because Murphy's a jerk. 

One of the symptoms is that the menu stops working. So there was that. But sometimes, you could still get the Input menu to come up, which was my case. And I'd spent literally five minutes trying all the usual things with combination button presses. Turned it off and back on.

But the DDG search also turned up this one other bit of advice that I should have had drilled into me from my 20+ years in the trade and then still being everyone's go-to IT person. Turns out that if you switch it off, unplug it, hold the power button down  for fifteen seconds and then plug the power back in while still holding it, that resets it.

If you could have worked that out without prior knowledge, I'll award you a Smartie Badge. I wonder how many HP monitors were tossed out because of that fault, that just needed a HP-Fu reset? 

Oh And There May Have Been A Reason

As we've had two years' worth of demolition and construction across the road, a few power outages, and a lot of vibration, I'm betting when the power plug fell out of the back of the monitor yesterday morning, it could have glitched the monitor mainboard. But it all works fine again, and next time I'll know. If I remember. If it ever happens again...

Hey - if you want to, you can send me a few bucks to (finally) work on getting a replacement for my laptop. It saves me having to be all cliche and setting up a GoFundMe or Patreon.

Or you could scroll back up, find the "donate" side of the banner image, and send me a few bucks there. And maybe subscribe to my once-a-week-only newsletter.