[vox-tech] monitor troubles

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Peter Jay Salzman (p@dirac.org):

> this isn't the whole story.  you can smoke your monitor.

1.  Not an LCD panel.  Very old tube monitors would be at risk.

2.  That advice to use correct HorizSync and VertRefresh values (if you
can look them up) is excellent and well stated, but I'm pretty sure all
monitors made since around 1990 have included protection circuitry.

Fried monitor were a problem for a while after the Sony MultiSync series
and imitators took over the market, because they accustomed people to
thinking that monitors would just cope with any analogue video signal,
syncronising on it if within the monitor's scanning range, and cutting
out if outside that range.  Problem was, the older monitors didn't do
that.  Either they accepted only one frequency vert/horiz pair or a
limited number of such pairs as "detents", but they lacked the
protection circuitry that prevents (to my knowledge) all modern monitors
from trying to grasp beyond their reach.

But definitely, specifying HorizSync and VertRefresh correctly in the
first place remains a good idea.

I've also not seen XFree86 fail in recent years to correctly probe the
amount of video RAM, so in my experience it's best not to specify a
number without a very compelling reason.

-- 
Cheers,             "Don't use Outlook.  Outlook is really just a security
Rick Moen            hole with a small e-mail client attached to it."
rick@linuxmafia.com                        -- Brian Trosko in r.a.sf.w.r-j