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IBM To Repair Smoking Monitors
Rio writes "A local6.com story says IBM is recalling to repair 56,000 G51 and G51t computer monitors because the circuit board can overheat and smoke, posing a fire hazard. IBM has received several reports of monitors overheating and smoking, including one report of minor property damage, according to the U.S. Consumer Products Safety Comission." And I thought all that smoke was just my mobo overheating.
My guess is that most of the people that use these are business customers (ie. used as cash register displays or something like that) and they don't want to lose any repeat business.
The PC market is flooded with second rate, faulty, poorly designed and nonfunctional hardware
Consumers want $1,000, $500, $300 PC's. What do you expect?
Let's go back in time a few years. The Pentium 133MHz had just come out, making the 120MHz look like a sweet deal. 16MB of RAM was pretty good, and 56K modems were all the rage. You'd get this kind of a deal for $1,999.
A monitor back then, 14" and 15" were standard, would cost you nearly $200. A 17" was a $350-$400 luxury. 19"? $500-700. And 21" monitors would cost you $1,000-$2,000!
Think about how cheap monitors are now. You can't GIVE away a 15". 17" are available for $69 after rebate from any retail store. 19" monitors are $200-$300. Once considered extravagant, 21" monitors are just a little more than the 17" monitors of yesterday. Hell, you can get a 15" LCD for $199.
The problem has always been quality. Sure, the bargain basement monitors work, but the colors are bad, they lack focus, and aren't the brightest, or are too bright.
The de facto standard has usually been the Sony Trinitron displays. I'd rather use a 3 year old Trinitron than a 1 year old bargain brand.
Now, the PC market is flooded with crappy monitors. (Not to mention OTHER components) Take a look at the Apple side of things, or the SGI/Sun workstations. They've had their share of bad products, but much of the OEM equipment is re-branded Sony models etc.
I saw one of these smoke itself spontaneously through code.
When I was in college, we had a couple of labs full of PS/2 Model 50s (286-based). One night, a friend of mine was testing calling assemply language routines from Turbo Pascal. She must have gotten some parameter passing or something very wrong, because as soon as she ran the app, it crashed and smoke started pouring out of the top of the monitor. At the time, we all thought that was the most impressive damn thng we had ever seen - a program that crashes so badly that it kills the machine. That takes more than a 3-finger salute to fix. Today, I'm a little more doubtful of the exact cause. It could have been a flaky monitor, but it would be a BIG coincidence for it to have had nothing to do with the program. (I wanted to try running the program again on a different machine and see if it happened again, but that seemed like a bad idea.)
On the subject of crappy IBM hardware, the PS/2s were far way from five 9s. I wasn't impressed by their service, either. Out of 35 or so systems, there were always about 3 or 4 dead ones. The service rep would come by about once a week, open them up and fiddle around inside, and then leave with at least one still dead. Admittedly, they were in regular use by student goons, but these were supposed to be high-end professonal quality tools. We had less trouble with the Leading Edge 8086es in our old lab.
Oh, and don't even get me started on the Microchannel architecture and the proprietary IBM configuration floppy you had to use to add new hardware and tweak the BIOS. Feh.
What if life is just a side effect of some other process and God has no idea we exist?