Ever had one of those days when everything went wrong at once? I haven't. But this came close.
First, a couple weeks ago, something went boing with my computer. Meaning my tower. Meaning not this laptop. Meaning that, to date, I'm limping along at 3GHz with half a gig of RAM, getting nothing much accomplished.
What happened was that I was in the middle of rendering something kinda extreme: millions of polygons at 720*480DV [luckily, the project didn't really require 1920*1080HD, so that saved some teraflops], and then the screen went black on me.
I restarted the computer, which I was kinda opposed to since I probably hadn't got everything entirely saved; LightWave9 has this neat ability to pull in anything from anywhere, but also this neat ability to forget to save every change to every thing you've pulled in from everywhere, meaning that I've probably got some texturemaps slightly off from what I kinda remember setting them to. Great.
Restarting the computer didn't help much. I got about as far as the meaningless screen telling me about CPUs and RAM and stuff; then it went black again. So, after trying that a few more times, I decide that it might be the screen, even though the screen's little light is still on.
That shoulda been my first thought, for obvious reasons. Because it's Dell W1700 HD. And Because there's a history about Dell and suction, in some order.
Once upon a time, in the nineties, I grabbed a Dell desktop thing. It was boring. I think it was an 80386 100% IBM Compatible PlusMinus 90%. Sorta like PackardHell, but different. Just, not much different. As it happened, I loaned the thing to someone who had less computers than I had, where I had about a dozen, and he had about zero. I never saw it again.
In 1994 or so, I wound up with this Dell laptop: an 80486 which, at the time, was [apart from the name] as good as laptops really got. Though, oddly, it was monochromed and inverted; anything red, white, yellow, or whatever was black; anything black, blue, green, or whatever was white. I was okay with that, since it didn't really get in the way of using this dismal machine to write books. It's not like I was using Wintel machines to render anything in the nineties; that's what Amigas were for. The name remained perplexing, since a dell is just some otherwise meaningless thing likely containing a farmer, where Dells in general suck too much to operate as renderfarms. So that never made a lot of sense.
2004. I know that Dell suck. No one even contests me on that fact. The last imbecile [also the first] I ever saw suggest that Dell made anything worth buying was BangBang; and that, given everything else from Banger, made perfect sense. But: I needed a new screen for my computer [not a Dell; not a brand at all; towers can be built bigger, better, faster, and cheaper from parts] so I wound up with this W1700 thing.
On the surface, that worked out. For about three years. It's an HDTV with a monitor port. In a perfect world, I can sit at the computer, rendering stuff and slaughtering CPUs, watching a film or playing a game through a different port: Picture in Picture or a separate feed. Great.
Until a couple weeks ago. Then something went boing.
So, now I suspect that it's the screen. I just don't do a lot about it, largely because the stuff I'm concentrating on at the moment is more literate, which I could conceivably deal with on a Dell 80496 inverted monochrome mess. I just don't.
Then, yesterday, the HDTV died.
Not the screen. The real one. The bigassed Samsung fucker Hunter hasn't turned off since we moved into this house. It's off now. It too went boing.
Her failed bugfix while waiting for the new one to show up in 3day free shipping [as of Saturday, meaning that it might get here by Thursday] was to go grab my burned out Dell, implant it into the livingroom, and watch HDCable and films and whatever on that.
Which didn't work, since it had gone boing.
So. Ever had one of those days? Like today? When I started really looking at this screen, noticing its model number, and running a quick search about it? Me too. And here's the news....
The first thing I found was a place still selling these things. The official reviews hovered around 9.1 out of ten, I think; the user reviews hovered around 5.1, with comments like Screen went black after 19 months and screen went blank after 20 mos. and screen died at 24 months. And I'm seeing a pattern here.
My next stop was http://www.osnews.com/story.php/17414/Followup-Dell-w1700 which mentioned:

It is rare for me to post a follow up to a review. However, this time I am left with no choice. Remember the television I reviewed? It was a fairly positive review; despite a few annoying glitches, I found the TV to be excellent value for money. Well, apparently, there's a clear cut reason why this television set is cheap. Read and weep.
The w1700 television from Dell suffers from a serious problem. It is a very common issue, as you can see by the replies on this forum - and trust me, this is not the only forum where this is discussed. The problem lies in Dell using a very cheap and badly made backlight inverter board; this board breaks down easily, leaving you with a black screen. Sound works, but that is it. This happened to the TV today.
After a quick browse around, I found that LCDpart.com sells a replacement backlight inverter board tailor made for the Dell w1700. However, this joke will set you back - gasp - USD 80. On top of that, you have to replace the board manually. While I am not scared of getting my hands dirty on these sorts of matters, I have always had a certain fear of working with monitors, tube TVs, and LCDs. They appear so fragile.
So, this is a common problem. It happens to many w1700 TVs; so many, that a third party actually sells - it even has them in stock - replacement boards. How does Dell fit into this? How do they respond? Surely, they have a replacement program, similar to what they (and many others) do with, for instance, laptop batteries? Well, you guessed wrong.
Read the Dell customers forums for the w1700 TV, and weep (this FAQ post comes from a Dell employee). They actually have the nerve to refer you back to the the LCDPart website, to the same replacement board as described above - meaning you are forced to pay USD 80 to manually fix their crappy engineering!
I was perplexed. I was angry as well. Not for myself; I got this television as a review item, so it did not cost me a penny. No, I feel anger because of all those people out there who bought this TV, even though Dell knew it had a faulty board in it.
It is perfectly acceptable, in my book, for equipment to be faulty sometimes; statistically it is almost impossible to produce goods without some error margin. However, when you know your product has a problem, fix it. Provide a replacement program. That is the correct course of action. Certainly, you do not send paying customers to a third party website where they must spend 80 USD on a DIY kit for replacing delicate electronic components!
The OSNews Top Tip for today: when purchasing relatively delicate technology, do not be a scrooge, and spend a few Dollars or Euros more on quality. No, really. Do it.

So: surprise; Dell suck.
To confirm that, I followed the link to Dell's sad little troubleshooting forum:

30. W1700 replacement backlight inverter
* T501045.00 Inverter - Manufactured by AMBIT for Dell W1700 17 LCD TV
Symptom: No Display ( No Picture) on screen but Power Indicate light stays on green. Or Screen Flickering.
* Instructions for replacing the W1700 inverter

That of course links to a thirdparty place making and selling replacementboards for Dell's substandard-yet-average shitware device.
Now, don't get me wrong: eighty bucks isn't a lot of money; I'll get that back from people clicking on adverts here by about the time my new screen [not a fucking Dell] arrives in the delayed 3day mail. That I've already bought another, bigger, better, less Dellish screen kinda nullifies the whole point, apart from the whole point being that Dell suck, which was already nullified by pretty much everyone on the planet knowing that congenitally. But still: it's irksome to have Dell--albeit known for sucking--sending out this shitware, knowing that it's going to break, doing nothing to prevent that, doing nothing to fix it, and even having one of their forumdroids tell me to follow the instructions in the .pdf this third party has published [which itself all but spells out the fact that Dell suck] including the part where I'm now supposed to ignore all the embossed warnings that taking this screen apart will result instantly in my death. And that really impresses me, since Dell are recommending this procedure to people who have proved themselves to be stupid enough to buy a Dell. I wonder whether I should unplug it before or after I microwave it to dry off the screen I just washed with Listerine....
So. That's pretty much that. I wound up with something made by Dell; now, a thousand bucks later and three days plus bluelawed weekends from now, I should have...whatever I just bought instead...LG, Toshiba, or something. I dunno.
I'm sure I'll figure out what it is once it breaks on me.
More later....

Forgot to add tags for this stupid entry.