[mbates14]

I have a 20" samsung LCD monitor i bought brand new in 2007, Still working and no repair has ever been done to it.

I have an off-the-wall chimei brand 19" LCD monitor beside it, it was bought in 2009 and it works still.

I run the backlights at reduced output, i dont need full brightness. maybe this is why they last?

I have been able to repair modern electronics pretty extensively, been able to chase down odd issues with newer TVs, such as vizio. I have ran into a few of their sets where the mainboards have failed, instead of finding another mainboard, i have been able to fix them, they are notorious for their regulator circuit failing causing a white vizio logo with no picture, or sound.

Fixed a sony once with a bad mainboard as well, needed a new FDS transistor pack in one of the DC-DC buck converters. had a few laptop motherboards this way as well, bad/shorted buck converters and capacitors in the CPU/GPU core voltage regulator circuits. Gateways with thier bad solder on the northbridge IC causing no-post, Bad SIS southbridge ICs on the old dell inspiron 1000s with no IDE functions. Not to mention countless xbox consoles that I had to perform GPU swaps on. Gotta do what I gotta do to bring in money these days, its hard. and dying fast.

Had a samsung DLP, older style with bad solder on the TI DLP processor IC. notorious for that. Run it under the IR workstation and reflow the solder. Had an Nvidia 9800GTX from back in the day, go all lines in the picture and fail to load the drivers. Reflow on that chip fixed it as well.

Acer Aspire 5532s notorious for the southbridge starting to get intermittent, corrupting the CMOS/BIOS. The new HP all-in-one models that have come out recently, starting to find them to just die randomly and never power up again, traced them back to an 8051-based ASIC that runs the system power management, fans, thermal sensors, LED/panels, etc... that glitches and wipes its programming onboard the IC. no fix for this. Call HP and ask for a hex file to flash onto the IC via a JTAG interface? HAHAHAH yea right.... But i did manage to find a leaked schematic out of HannStar for that though.... Thats how i figured out the IC had failed. Plus its pretty obvious when that ASIC has full standby power, 3.3V and 5V, but the internal pull-ups that go to the keymatrix arnt enabled, the chip is bad.

I have found with laptops that appear dead, no lights, no power, first thing i check is the charge controller/power selection circuitry. If the 8 pin SMD MOSFET is engauged and supplying mains power to the system board, and no shorts appear in the DC-DC circuits, usually that ASIC fails. laptops have them as well, and they are used in laptops to scan the mouse touchpad, keyboard, all the system buttons, fans, LEDs, etc...