Hi all,

I'm still fooling around with my Dell 2209waf trying to figure out the problem. We had a lightning strike a while back that destroyed a few lights and phones. My computer and the Dell monitor were on a UPS backup which is also surge protected but when I checked on the computer, it was froze and needed to be rebooted. Everything worked fine until a few months afterward when the monitor would suddenly dim and color shift toward the red. It was still usable only the color balance and brightness changed. After a few minutes it would brighten back to normal. This went on for a year or so until finally it dimmed and never came back to normal.

I replaced the inverter board and there was no change. I took the entire unit apart down to the ccfl's and they all had just a slight blackening on each end. There is only 8000 hours of use on the monitor. I didn't test any of the bulbs individually.

Another strange thing is when I bring up a web browser or any program and then close it, there is a ghost of the window remaining on the desktop for a minute or so. Is this the way aging ccfl's behave? I'm just wondering if some chip got damaged on the power supply/logic board during the strike. Any input would be appreciated.

I don't know how a defective monitor would retain a ghost window, if it did it would almost have to be in the electronics and not the back light.

Are you sure it's not your video card that's dying?

Otherwise I would suggest bad capacitors since that's the most common problem with just about everything electronic.

No, it's not the video card as the monitor acts the same way on two other computers. Strange thing is I can't reproduce the ghost image again. What a pain intermittent problems can be.