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Old Computers Vs. The Environment
VValdo writes: "Salon is running an interesting story about the dangers of throwing old computers into landfills. According to the story, the American Electronics Association is trying to block a European Commission proposal that would make manufacturers responsible for the environmental damage that occurs when lead, mercury, chromium, etc. leaks into 'the life cycle.'" One interesting factoid: "Lead constitutes approximately 25 percent of monitors by weight, and the estimate of 5 to 8 pounds per unit is based on 14- and 15-inch monitors." (Which author Jim Fisher points out is no longer the typical display size for current systems.)
It isn't always true that old machines burn lots of power, not PCs anyway. 386 and 486 processors run much cooler than the Pentium or its successors, and it looks to me as if other parts like memory also use less power. Old hard disks are much thirstier than their modern equivalents but that doesn't seem to make much of a difference.
For example, I have a PS/2 Model 55SX which powers 16 megs of RAM (including eight SIMMs on an expansion card), a 1987-model 3c523 Ethernet card, XGA-2 accelerated video and a 120Mbyte ESDI disk all from a 90W power supply. It's because none of these older components need much power - the only heatsink is on the video card.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
The HP manager they quoted said "The cost of recycling -- because there is a cost, it doesn't happen for free and it doesn't generate positive revenues -- has never been a part of the commercial equation." The problem is that disposal has never been part of the equation either. The standard model is this: pass the cost onto the consumer, who passes the cost onto the municipality, who passes the cost onto future generations. The problem is that this has been going on so long we are the future generation.
Paul Hawken, the entrepreneur and environmental thinker, suggests that appliances such as computers, TVs, washing machines and the like be leased rather than sold, with the manufacturer. The retailers would become leasing agents. At the end of the lease period the manufacturer would have to take the appliance back. The reason for this is that because the manufacturer has to deal with the waste, it would have incentive to engineer their products to be more recyclable. Even for things like circuit boards which are hard to recycle, the physical concentration would increase the economic viability of investing in the technology to recover the materials.
If a fraction of the emphasis that is placed on styling and packaging were placed on recycling, much more of the materials, including toxic materials such as lead and cadmium, could be recaptured from the waste stream and turned into products.
The problem with this scenario is that its hard to change business models; although many businesses currently lease computers, they retain them at the end because after a couple of years a computer is essentially trash. Perhaps the rising disposal fees for computers will incent consumers to prefer a lease and give-it-back program. However I doubt dumping fees will ever truly reflect the true cost, for one thing because they must be small enough to make risking illegal dumping not worthwhile. Perhaps if businesses are hit with a $200 disposal fee for a computer, the lease and give it back option would be more attractive.
Sustainability is a tautology. Businesses will adopt environmentally sustainable models because not to do so is, well, unsustainable. But this is a lot like saying if there is a fire in your house, eventually it will burn itself out. The question remains is what will our environmental quality of life be? The key is to take steps now when the problem is small enough that liquidating our environmental assets doesn't seem economically rational.
For more information, I recommend visiting the Natural Step website. The Natural Step is an organization promoting a business friendly environemntal practices based on least common denominator scientific positions.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
my friend and i are in preliminary stages of finding cool ways to turn old computers and their peripherals, including monitors, into artwork...
anybody have parts for us / urls / ideas? anything would be appreciated, no matter how obsolete... we're not looking at a mass-production kinda thing, but a custom, work-by-work approach...
seriously, if you have old hardware, please contact me at probably@innocent.com or my coartist:) at therealbean@yahoo.com
if it's something cool or just a lot of generic stuff, we'd be willing to pick it up or possibly pay shipping, even though we are artists who are pretty near starving:)... thanx in advance
This EXACT claim was made in Scientific American awhile (year?) ago - monitors contain X pounds of lead that can leak into the environment. A few people shot back that this statistic was WAY off mark. The problem is that people are being mislead and not bothering to FUCKING THINK. The article was simply misworded. Actual lead by weight vs material (by weight) that can leak lead over time; 2 separate creatures. The entire piece of monitor glass can be a source of lead leaking into the water table - but that does NOT mean that the amount of lead (by weight) is 25% of the weight of the monitor.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
It's fairly low, maybe somewhat in the 5-10$ range for an entire PeeCee.
You buy the right to dump your equipment at designated areas (set up in every major city) from where it's recycled or disposed off environmentally friendly.
The same system applies for other items which threaten the environment. I.e. 5-20 cents for a battery, ~40$ for a fridge, 1.20$ for a garbage bag etc...
Of course I hear the corporate greed freaks and the relentless absolute capitalists yelling about anti competiveness and hurting businesses and people driving to france to get the stuff (which doesn't happen, since the VAT is 3 times as much) and then dump it in the woods.
The problem with a totally free market however, is that it has a tendency to socialize costs - especially hidden costs like killing off the environment - but to privatize profits.
In this light I think it's a very fair system where he who dumps pays and there is an incentive to dispose of stuff relatively environmentally friendly.
Incoming...
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
I'd buy a 17" LCD monitor with 25 or so dead pixels in a heartbeat if I could get it for a reasonable price -- I can think of lots of applications where the advantage of having a flat screen would more than outweigh the aggrivation of having a couple of dead pixels.
"The axiom 'An honest man has nothing to fear from the police'
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
it killed the romans
I see lots of comments about recycling and about donating computers to charity. Recyling is good, yes, but a good part of the problem falls on the shoulders of the consumer. How many computers have you bought in the last ten years? How many times have you upgraded your video card? How many times have you bought a larger hard drive?
Upgrading can be good, but I think we're in a bad cycle of upgrading and not getting solidly tangible results from the upgrade. Okay, a bigger hard drive will let you store more stuff. But at the same time, the average game is taking 500MB to install. A video card may be faster, but are developers really taking good advantage of that card, or is it that developers were only taking 40% advantage of the previous generation, so you upgraded to make up the difference? When you look back at the amazing stuff being done on the five year old PlayStation--which has specs that aren't even up to the Voodoo 1 level--and see games that frequently look like high-end PC games, it makes you wonder.
About donating to charity: you need to be careful not to use this as a way to justify your consumerism. The Salvation Army and other charities gets heaps of junk dumped on them that they often end up having to pay to get hauled away. Mattresses hard difficult to recycle, so mattress stores often talk about how they'll give your old mattress to charity for you. It's common for charities to not know what to do with thousands of old, stained mattresses, so they just dump them. You can't funnel the castaways of hundreds of millions of people down the much smaller charity pipe.
This kind of measures may seem bizare to many Americans, but its actually very common in Europe to hold the producers of throwable goods responsible for the recycling. I know that in Germany, at least in some landers (states), the manufacturers are forced to take back their packaging and dispose of it, but they have taxes on private companies using landfills, so they are basicly forced to recycle and reduce it. What really surprised me in this article is that they weren't already responsible. For the monitors, it may favorise their export/resale to poorer countries.... Where they can easily be thrown away, that's one of the known ways to get around the law
Sugar is the end of a complex refining process that takes away every trace of minerals, vitamins and fibre from the beets/cane/other original vegetable, except for the calories. Eating sugar raises the level of your blood fats, putting stress on your pancreas as it tries to maintain blood sugar level. It can also contribute to atherosclerosis.
Most of us in Europe/ North America/ et al. eat about 2 pounds (~1 kilo) of the stuff each week, providing about 20-25% of our calories. You can find it in almost every packaged food in some form, from baked beans to diet sodas. We have a natural liking for sweet (as well as fatty) foods. This comes from times when food was hunted and gathered, not loaded into a trolley, and we were (still are) hardwired to find substances to help us through lean times. Try switching to products with raw, unrefined sugar. Here the sucrose crystal is surrounded by a thin film of molasses containing 200 odd organic nutrients, many of them involved in breaking down sucrose in the body.
Unsulphured molasses are very nice by the spoonful =)
http://fsfeurope.org/
Sample Ad: Hackers needed to "hack" apart monitors and remove lead from old monitors to recycle lead parts. No computer experience needed. $6.50/hr starting pay.
In Massachusetts, it's now illegal to dump a monitor, television, or other cathode-ray tube device without obtaining a permit. Last year, my PC class had to chuck ten ancient monitors; we just made it, because the deadline hadn't hit. However, I wonder how this will affect educational institutions and their tenacity to old hardware.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Apple Macintosh computers are considered the most environmentally friendly machines available. This is not a reason I use one, but it is nice to know. Though I expect Apple CRT monitors are no better than anyone else's, using lead to shield the radiation, I wonder if the new LCD, especially the 22 inch model are environmentally friendly.
www.apple.com/about/environment
On another topic, chromium causes cancer yet most vitamin manufactures insist on putting it into their formulas. Why I do not know.
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He lives in a world where those who do not run the client software of the omnipresent meme are unacceptable.
I think your missing some points.
First, companies still aren't held responsible for "[...]an irresponsible owner's disposal of his machine."
Their held responsible for the legal disposal of your machine.
"Making manufacturers responsible would just result in higher consumer prices."
Which you had to pay otherwise, too. (Legal disposal assumed.)
But now you can consider the costs of buying and disposal before you bought it. Forcing the companies to reduce the costs of disposal as it becomes the costs you pay.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
Got Rhinos?
I agree with the core idea of your comment, but...
Why should you be able to purchase a consumer good and pass off part of the real cost oof that good on those who did not consume the good? There's this self-righteous get-your-hands-off-my-consumer-goods attitude in America that assumes that people have a God-given right to "cheap" fuel and other "cheap" consumables when the real cost of the production, use, and disposal of those goods are not figured into the purchase price.
When the Dutch Government, as described in another post on this topic, forces manufacturers to add a recycling surcharge onto their goods, it is not as if a completely new cost is being added on to the good. It's a cost that already has to get paid one way or another; it's simply being charged to the actual consumer, rather than passed off on everyone else down the line.
Inclusive pricing goes a long way toward motivating people to make the rational use and reuse choices you advocate. If I have to pay $75 extra on that TV to cover the hidden costs of the manufacture and disposal of that TV, might I not consider buying a more reliable TV so that I don't have to pay that surcharge again? Might I not repair it rather than replace it? If I have to pay the actual costs of motor vehicle use -- infrastructure, law enforcement, pollution abatement, etc. -- every time I buy a gallon of gas, might I not make a rational choice not to purchase an SUV?
But instead we are shielded from the actual costs of this stuff, so it makes good market sense for manufacturers to make lousy, difficult-to-repair, disposable products covered in wads of packaging. And when the time comes to clean all this crap up, people whine and say, "you can't take my money! It's my money, not the Gummint's!"
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Give me liberty or give me something of equal or lesser value from your glossy 32-page catalog.
I've had the same monitor and case for about 4 years, while swapping out the motherboard twice, and CPUs at least 3-4 times.
My previous monitor (15") is about 8 years old, and is sitting on my wife's desk, along with the case from 8 years ago with (of course) new PS, MB, and etc.
-- Ever notice that fast-burning fuse looks exactly the same as slow-burning fuse? I didn't... (Edgar Montrose)
Guess I'd better hurry up and invent the lead to gold converter then, I'll be rich I tell you, RICH =P
Time to go back to the insanity ward.
--
Whether or not the lead leaks the fact is obsolence in this field is FAST and the result is that so much silicon and plastic and so on has got to pile up somewhere. Whether or not there is leakage from contaminants, these extremely non biodegradeable materials will have to take up some space because they get thrown away so often.
The other thing to think about is that geeks often forget that computation is ubiquitious and therefore everyone has computers and doesn't know what to do with old ones. Most people wouldn't know how to jury rig old systems together with obsolete parts and find a use for them - and those are the majority of computer users today.
For that matter, the computing industry as a whole is totally screwed by complete lack of ingenuity when it comes to recycling. Just recently I had a leftover case and p350 proc, and all I wanted was a very small, very cheap hard drive, new, to make a machine for my girlfriend. Since I'm in a small town in the US at the moment I can't go to my usual urban haunts with used parts, and my options are to basically buy a new 20 gig drive and that's it.
And one other thing - laminated chipboard is some of the most durable stuff on earth. It's nearly frigging invincible to the elements. And it's already started to pile up, and boy is it gonna get worse. Whether or not you think computers are safe to dump without contamination to the environment, fact is that the landfill is land that could, say, be a park for kids to play in.
Just some friendly idealism and simplicity from someone who considers outta sight outta mind to be one of the most dangerous attitudes out there.
** http://www.nkhumanrights.or.kr/ ** Human rights in North Korea. 1 million estimated dead from starvation.
Actually you can do this and many recycling facilities do to separate metals (including non-ferrous, or generally non-magnetic) from other materials. The way it works is you drop the material in a rapidly oscillating magnetic field which produces a force on any conductive (read metal) material in the waste stream. This force pushes the metal into a separate path from the rest of the material (here's an example of a commercial separator). The only problem I see is that most of the lead is IN the glass (CRT's are good quality moderately leaded ~20% glass) and I don't see the lead in the glass being separated except through melting.
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It's supposed to be illegal to dispose of the old oil out of your car just anywhere too, but it seems to me that if I got caught dumping it DOWN BY THE RIVER -- it wouldn't be the Pennzoil corporation that would be held responsible!
Actually, in Austria, for every liter of motor oil you buy, the shop has to take back a liter of old oil. This oil then needs to be disposed of by the shop in a legal fashion. It makes the disposal of the old oil very hassle-free for the customer.
You see, not everything that seems unusual to your vision of the world is automatically moronic. Just different, sometimes even better. And no, I won't start another thread about the curious perception, that in order to live in peace one needs to arm himself with medium size artillery.
Cheers,
johi
Here is a list of current regulations in the USA for the disposal of electronic equipment including CRT's. National Recycling Coalition EPA and the Display Industry State of Massachusetts CRT Recycling Right now, it is the consumer's responsability to dispose of these electronics following national & local regulations. In the future, it will be the electronics manaufacturers' responsability.
The stuff on the glass is the aquadag coating. It is only a carbon based conductive coating. It is on the inside and has the high voltage connected to it. It is also on the outside to make the tube a capacitor to filter the high voltage from the flyback transformer. The glass itself contains lead (especially the front face) to absorb the X-rays created when the electron beam accelerated by the high voltage strikes the target phospher on the faceplate. Monitors have more lead than TV's because they are designed to be viewed at closer distances. The X-rays from a TV exposure is limited because like light, doubling the distance from the source squares the area and therefore reduces the exposure by the square root of the distance viewed.
The truth shall set you free!
I've taken apart monitors. Sometimes with high velocity lead :) [I live in Texas, where such things are highly approved of] Other than the customary wave soldered PC boards, I can see no metallic lead.
:)
That cathode-ray tube (CRT) is _very_ heavy, especially the front face. My guess is they've mixed alot of Lead oxide into the glass to reduce radiation emissions from the monitor -- meet the specs. But AFAIK, this Lead oxide is totally immobile and insoluble except in strong mineral acids and alkalis. Shouldn't have any of those in a landfill
What I'm wondering is, how can more businesses be encouraged to participate in this kind or recycling. Obviously they have the most disposable hardware, but its often hard to find it. They're probably prefer to give it away than have people take it from their dumpster......
Look, I like high quality items just as much as the next geek. But once you consider the time-value of money (compound interest), excessive quality just isn't economically efficient.
Consider two items that basically do the same thing. One costs $200, and the other $100 because it's not as durable. Now if that $100 item lasts only a year, while the $200 item lasts forever, then I'm probably better off buying the quality item unless my personal interest rate is 100%pa.
For some people it is, or they just don't have the extra money.
Now change the numbers. The $100 item lasts two years, and you'll want to replace them both in 6 years for improved functionality. Now a 27% interest rate is the breakeven.
For a concrete example, look at houses. European houses are built to last -- tile roofs & floors, thru-brick walls inside & out. But they cost 3-4 times a N.American house which might not last more than 20-60 years (asphalt shingle roof, wood fram construction, siding.) and that with more maintenance. But to payout the higher quality, you have to have an unrealistically low rate of interest (1-2%).
I'm very depressed about this, but I cannot see any way out. Albert Einstein was right when he described the power of compound interest as miraculous.
Good point. Glass is very stable chemically. Glass and pottery are found intact in archeological sites thousands of years old.
There are some mechanized plants for shredding old electronics and separating out ferrous scrap, nonferrous metallic scrap, nonmetallic heavy scrap (chips, ceramics, glass, etc.), and "fluff" (light plastic, insulation, etc.). The metallic scrap can be recycled profitably, but it's hard to find something useful to do with the nonmetallic stuff. DMC Recycling says they can recycle about 97% by weight of what comes in.
...At least in the San Francisco Bay Area.
We had 19 (count 'em) monitors that were just going to get tossed. Ordinarily we would have roof-disposed them (tossed them off the roof of our four-story building and watch them go *smash*; quite entertaining for a typical male geek), but I had just read how much toxic crud is in these things, and sought to get them recycled.
It turns out there's only one organization even remotely set up to recycle monitors in the Bay Area (and, if I had my notes in front of me, I'd post their contact info). It took me a day to actually locate this organization, a few more days to actually speak to a live person, and even then I was informed that, unless one of their people just happened to be in the area, on-site pick ups were, as a rule, not something they did (since they didn't charge for the service).
To make a long story short, they said they'd get back to me. The monitors languished in our hallway for two months, taking up space. They finally disappeared last week, but I have no idea where to. Frankly, I'm afraid to ask.
So if you want to be environmentally conscious in the Bay Area with more than just soda cans and newspapers, you're going to have to work at it. No one's providing the service.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
It's just that we pay them at repair time. Any time I have my oil changed, I pay a disposal fee. Same thing goes for tires. As long as this money is actually going to dispose of these things in an enviromentally sound way, I'm happy to pay it. So let me pay to dispose of my PC parts at the time when I'm finished with them, not at the beginning.
:(
Europeans seem to "get" the clean-earth idea more than we Americans do. Probably because they don't have thousands of acres of desert to dump stuff in. This country needs to make it easy to dispose of things the right way. Until then, PC parts, batteries, paint, etc. will simply go in the trash.
This sounds like a solid reason for manufacturers of components and systems to face their governments with facts about their products. NEC and other manu's should address the lead content in CRT monitors and suggest that the government make this information very public.
This isn't to scare the public, but let them know the dangers of the contaminations of these products. We do this with batteries, asbestos, and many other toxins, why not with computers?
Produce a special recycler/incinerator for a definite capita of that nation (like 1 for every 250,000 units/people), which would make regular runs (1st of the month?) in the area to pick up old monitors, batteries, etc., and take them to be disposed of properly.
Instead of holding the manufacturers hostage to the contaminations, since we don't do this with television manufacturers even after all these years, this just makes the most sense. Or possibly there can be companies setup to do services like these for big businesses, since they probably waste more products per year than the general population (I'm not certain, just guessing).
Anyone else think this would be a better plan?
Dragon Magic
Human nature is the same everywhere; the modes only are different. -- Earl of Chesterfield
Hopefully corp America will see the light and the demand will force the price of thouse 21" LCDs down to $300 like they should be.
The lead is for x-ray shielding so you don't get over exposed if the voltage gets a bit too high.
I wonder if there are some statistics about that. Also it would be nice to see if the same holds for the corporate world, or if the IS departments blindly upgrade screen and system (which I think is happening, and may not be the wisest thing).
Common sense is not so common - Voltaire
Instead of holding the manufacturers hostage to the contaminations, since we don't do this with television manufacturers even after all these years, this just makes the most sense. Or possibly there can be companies setup to do services like these for big businesses, since they probably waste more products per year than the general population (I'm not certain, just guessing).
Actually the TV companies have been forced to do it for years in Europe.
I've read quite a few comments saying: "but there are recycling companies". This is true, but recycling of old computer partsd is getting less and less profitable because newer parts use cheapear material... aluminium instead of gold. And use less of it... So basicly they want to force the manu's to subsides recycling, this may again seem bizare to Americans, but its quite common in Europe. I know they at least apply it to cars and food packaging, if not all packaging in some countries...
Just an addition: Computers cannot be burnt, legally at any rate, since their emmissions have a dangerous amount of mustard gas, which is a highly potent mutagen and "extremely effective" carcinogen (ie. oxidant catalyst, if I remember correctly). Or at least, the 1980 counterparts of modern computers did, which I believe is what the issue here is with.
No, Europe is a bigger market population wise than the US, but the European Commission= European Union = smaller pop. wise than the US.
When you buy something you own all of it, not just select pieces. Since it is yours it is yours to take care of recycling it or whatever you are going to do with it when it no longer functions to meet your desired means. Holding the company who created it responsible really makes no sense since it is no longer their property. I hold this under the same notion as DVD ownership, if you bought it you should be able to make a coaster out of it, nuke it in the microwave, or DeCSS it. BTW: You are also responsible for disposing of the DVD:)
It might be a good idea to make it illegal for dumps and landfills to take old computers (which would encourage you take it to the recyclers), but I don't see how the manufacturers should be held responsible for an irresponsible owner's disposal of his machine.
Making manufacturers responsible would just result in higher consumer prices. (MFG would have to build-in the cost of disposal for trade-ins).
"Yeah, in my day we used to collect computers from the ditches and take them back to the store for the deposits!"
Curious George
***General Consultant to the Human Race*** My opinions are free. You get what you pay for.
There is a lot of possible pollution in computers.
However, lead isn't a likely one, it is dissolved in the glass at the time that is blown into the shape of the CRT bottle, and it isn't likely to come out until the glass dissolves.
Considering that one of the prefered ways controlling the spread of radio active waste is to dissolve it into glass, I think this lead is fairly safe.
I wish people would worry about real pollution problems, such as the poisons in circuit componets and motherboards, and not about the ones that aren't.
- The food that's bad for people shall taste great.
- The useful chemical elements shall be toxic.
But why???When energy gets cheap enough, you could dump the stuff in an industrial-scale mass spectrometer, and get all the constituent elements dropped into buckets. But we'll need fission or fusion power for that, and there's not enough activity in either field now.
[A mass spectrometer immolates a material with an electric flame or plasma torch, which tears apart most molecules into simple molecules or atoms. After electrically charging the material, it is thrown past a magnet -- lighter elements are deflected further than heavier ones, thus separating the various types of materials. Imagine dumping a truckload of junk into a rocket exhaust and ending up with a bucket of lead, a bucket of iron, a bucket of carbon, and tanks of hydrogen and oxygen...along with many more buckets of rather pure materials]
And this lead leaches out of the glass in the landfill how?
And while we're at it, the talk of banning lead solder seems also to be a crock - the non-lead alternatives to solder have higher melting points, meaning changes to manufacturing processes for chip and board alike.
Now, leaving aside the expenses that these changes will add to your gear (because like a good envionmentuhlists, we all believe that any cost is justified "even if it saves one chiiiyuld"), you've solved one problem, but created another one, namely:
Crappy solder means higher failure rates, which means even more crap thrown into landfill.
This is fine if you're a manufacturer - you get to sell the customer two $59.99 VCRs and a $150 TV every couple of years as the solder joints - already crap in most consumer gear as witnessed by the flood of complaints in sci.electronics.repair - go cold on you and the customer can't be bothered to get it fixed because the cost of "junk it and buy a new one" is less than the cost of "fix it".
All that's changed in this wacky EU proposal is that the gummint gets to charge the company another ~10-20% as a penalty for making disposable crap - the company then passes the costs on to you. It's no skin off their nose when the consumer would rather have a $150 (or $150+$20 "green" tax buried in the price = $170) piece of crap than a $500 piece of equipment.
You wanna really help the environment? Screw this "gummint oughta tax manufacturers who make products we don't like" crap. Just do two things:
Now, not everyone can (or should!) fix their own gear, especially if it's a TV set. But that fix was trivial, and any repair tech would have recognized the failure instantly (vertical deflection failures are common on this model), and said "$5 for the new parts, $50 for knowing which parts you need".
Hell, even if you don't want it fixed, consider giving it to a local repair tech. "Hey, if you can fix it, it's yours, find someone who wants it".
Back to my set - that set was made in 1993, just at the start of the decline in consumer electronics quality. But it's still going strong a couple of years after I picked it up. I fully expect this set to last until HDTV renders it (and all our other sets) obsolete in 6-8 years.
(And yeah, I'll be stocking up on lead solder, just in case it's banned by the time I need it to fix something!)
Side note -- the real cause of failure in that set - and many monitors and TVs - was dust buildup. High voltages used in monitors and TVs mean lots of static to attract dust. The dust coats the components, trapping heat. The heat is what killed the capacitor, resulting in the failed amp chip.
Practical upshot -- if you read a few FAQs (e.g. http://www.repairfaq.org) and learn the basic safety rules for working in a monitor, you can probably save yourself a lot of headaches by just getting in there and cleaning out the dustbunnies every 5 years.
Less heat. Less stress on parts. Less landfill. Happier planet.
Or to borrow an old WWII slogan: "Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without."
This ain't new, kids.
It's all about innovation. It's all about competition. It's all about productivity, efficiency and success.
Is it me, or has Microsft permanently tainted the word "innovation"? As another /.er's sig points out, you can tell how desperate they are by how many times they say the word "innovate"...
You save money and gain clout. Most importantly you have a voice in Washington...
What do these guys do? They lobby for your needs and wants on the hill (trade association). GREAT!!! How do I sign up?... Us geeks need to get our voice into this channel to the whitehouse!
Wait, I can't. Because I must be a corporation. So how do we get a voice in this org? Does anyone here know anything more?
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting