[vox-tech] 10 year old monitor finally died

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Jonathan Stickel (jjstickel at comcast.net):

> Since I've been using Linux (~2002), I've not seen a monitor go up in 
> smoke due to incorrect settings.  Maybe some old-school linuxers can 
> give some horror stories, but I don't think you have much risk in just 
> trying out your new monitor with your old settings.  Then you can make 
> adjustments by editing /etc/X11/xorg.conf.

Spot-on, sir.

Although I'm not willing to personally guarantee the continued usability
of anyone's monitor, my understanding is that the problem was limited to 
certain single-frequency and multiple-fixed-frequency monitors sold, in
general terms, through around 1992, that lacked protection circuitry
because their designers simply didn't anticipate their being driven by
video cards at high scanning rates (or were just being cheap; not sure).
On those, their rated frequency limits really mattered, because, if you
tried something faster, the monitor would _attempted_ to keep up,
failed, and consequently let the magic smoke out.

(Anecdotes about those disasters typically said the monitor emitted some
sort of high-pitched squeal for some minutes before the damage
occurred.)

Better and later monitors included circuits to shut down the electron
gun any time you fed them an input signal outside the design limits, and
I haven't encountered anything lacking such a circuit in ages.

My understanding is that LCD monitors were never vulnerable, FWIW.