Monitors

My wife's flat screen display started acting up over the weekend: it suddenly goes black for no apparent reason. Press the buttons on the front panel, turn it off and on, wiggle the mouse (?!?!), and eventually it would come back on. Bah, humbug.
     This same monitor pulled this same trick about a year ago (or maybe two). It would go off and stay off for about ten seconds and then it would come back on for about ten seconds. It would just keep doing this and nothing I did seemed to have any effect. I decided that some internal, automatic circuit breaker was tripping, cooling off, resetting over and over. Well, if that is indeed the problem, and I can identify that part, I might be able to fix it.
   I did a little research on the net and I found a story about BAD CAPACITORS  Seems the whole industry suffered from a plague of these things back in the early aughts, which would be about the right time frame. Symptoms sounded similar, so I opened up the case, very carefully prying all the stupid little plastic hooks loose and noting where are all the electrical cables plugged in. Get it opened up and look at the circuit boards and . . . they look fine. All the capacitors  which should have been bloated and oozing, according to the rumors, all looked just fine. So I bolted it back together.
    When my wife's laptop died, I resurrected her old desktop and gave her this flat panel monitor, and it's been working fine ever since, well, until this weekend.
    So now what? I've opened it up once and didn't find anything, but perhaps it was just feeling neglected and spending some time on it improved its' attitude enough that it decided to start working. Or maybe unplugging and and then re-plugging the cables dislodged some minute amount of corrosion that was causing the problem. Voodoo in either case.
    It bugs me that the old monitor has been effectively reduced to scrap by some minuscule flaw, but it is doubtful there is enough time available in this universe to track it down. The only real solution is another monitor, so today Jack and I went down to Green Century in downtown Portland and I picked up a slightly larger display for $45 and so far it's working fine.
    There is one problem and that is that the computer won't produce exactly the same resolution as the monitor uses, so the display is not as crisp as it could be. But I might be able to fix that with a new computer.  Green Century had a newer Dell, very similar to hers, but bigger and more powerful for the low low price of $75. That almost makes it worth buying just to avoid having to re-install Windows, which is something I have been avoiding for about six months now.