My widescreen LCD monitor started acting up a little while back. First it had horizontal lines running from top to bottom. They would go away as the monitor went through the day but would return the following day when I turned it on.

Then a couple of weeks ago, the monitor was hard to start and stay running. It would start but the screen would go black after a couple of seconds but trying to turn it on a few times, it would come on and stay on until I’d turn it off that night to sleep. Then it finally wouldn’t pop on for good.

I opened the monitor up and noticed a couple of bulging capacitors and one actually had a small leak. It was such a small leak that it was hardly noticeable. Now I never soldered anything before so I tried to go the route of just buying a replacement power supply. That was until I saw the prices people who had them were trying to sell them for. $125?! Nah, I don’t think so! You can buy a brand new LCD for less than that.

I priced the parts I’d need. Soldering iron, solder (although the iron came with some but I wasn’t sure if it was the 60/40 or not so bought some), desoldering braid (total waste), and four capacitors at Radio Shack. It cost me about 20 dollars for that.

The braid did me no good. It was not helping at all. So the following day I went back to Radio Shack and got a desoldering iron/pump. Now my total bill came to about 30 dollars.

I had a doomed non-working video card I’d thought I’d use as my test dummy with the desoldering iron/pump. I was struggling on that thing for almost an hour with no luck thinking it was futility. I then just bit the bullet and figured what do I have to lose if I mess up the power board in there. It’s not like it was working anyhow. Getting the bad caps off the power board took about 2 minutes to get all four off. I guess that old video card was too old and that solder just wasn’t going to come off.

Now I learned that I didn’t have to replace all four because once I replaced the one with the little leak mark, the LCD powered right up like it did when I first got it. But since I got the new capacitors already and the others had small bulges, I replaced them anyhow.

And now my LCD is back and working just like new.

Before you try to do this if you have a similar situation, I would say if you can just replace the board for a fair price, do it if you do not have soldering experience. If you want this to be your first soldering job, be sure to check out a lot of good informational videos and write-ups all over the web. I would list them but there are far too many and so many are excellent.

Next post, I will talk about something that used to be on Stunbolts in the early days. If you were alive in the 80’s and remember the video arcades of the time, you won’t want to miss how to bring all that home to you and it could be done pretty cheap. That is if you have patience, an old computer you are about to throw on the side of the road, and very little know-how.