I told my kids not to buy me anything for Christmas, because my present was going to be a new LCD monitor. FutureShop last week had some on sale, so I bopped into the store to look at them.
The Pre-Sales Legwork
The look of monitors is important to me, because I look at one 8-16 hours a day. In the store, I found that the cheapest of the over-20-inchers was also the best looking: the ProView Pl225AFW for CDN$369 (about US$325). It's a 22" widescreen LCD with hidden stereo speakers (I'll probably never use 'em), two VGA connectors, and a digital video connector.
The problem, however, was its resolution: a rather odd 1680x1050. My existing graphics board, an ATI 8500LE, would not work. It was old enough that widescreen screens hadn't been invented, and when all screens were assumed to have the standard 4:3 aspect ratio.
(By the way, note that widescreen LCDs are marketed as giving you MORE screen, when in fact they give you LESS. This ProView unit provides me with 210 fewer lines of resolution than would a normal 4:3 monitor.)
My son had a spare BFG graphics board that uses an nVidia GPU. (He goes through graphics boards like some guys go through girlfriends.) Since it was less than two years old, I wondered if it might work. I read through the documentation, which was completely unhelpful. But I noticed there that the card's utility software had a feature that would allow me to specify any screen resolution.
"This just might work," I told me son. "Consider it your Christmas present from me," he replied.
In anticipation of buying the new monitor, I needed to swap graphics boards. This is always tedious work, because it consists of these steps:
1. Uninstall the ATI driver.
2. Uninstall the two related Catalyst software packages.
3. Shut down the computer.
4. Dive under my desk with a flashlight to remove ATI graphics board.
5. Install BFG board. Cough at all the dust being stirred up.
6. Start up computer, which relaunches in VGA graphics mode.
7. Install BFG driver.
8. And then wait for the computer to reboot.
I checked out the BFG utility software, and sure enough it had a section for entering custom resolutions. I hoped it would work with the new monitor.
The next step: deciding the optimal day to make the purchase. I decided on Wednesday, Dec 13, because (1) it was still on sale (FutureShop sales end on Thursdays); and (2) two weeks later was the Boxing Week sale, when the price might come down, and I would be eligible for some cash back.
(I did that last year: bought an Optima 1024x768 projector before Christmas, found the price was $200 less during Boxing Week, go the refund from FutureShop, and then used the $200 to buy a 100" screen.)
Next up: buying (and returning) the ProView monitor.
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