Yay, I have my big old 21″ CRT monitor back. The desktop guys weren’t that surprised; apparently I’m not the first to find the 1280×1024 worse than dealing with a grumpy CRT. So I think I’ll hold onto this guy until it just doesn’t work at all anymore, and then look into specifically requesting a particular monitor model to keep 1600×1200 around.
4 responses to “Victory!”
What you want is a Dell UltraSharp 2007FP 20.1-inch LCD monitor, which does 1600×1200 @ 60 Hz. They seem to be selling for $420 USD these days.
I’m kind of partial to the SGI 24″ widescreen CRT sitting on my desk right now. 1600×1200, 85Hz. I think they cost about $10,000 when they were new. But this one couldn’t be calibrated any more, so the customer didn’t want it any more, ergo my desk.
Yeah, that’s probably what I’ll request if this monitor gets unusably bad instead of just occasionally flaky (especially since we’re a Dell shop on the desktop already). Even still, I like the LCD/CRT mix better than a pair of LCDs (one’s in the laptop), because that way I can configure subpixel smoothing correctly on one and ignore the other.
This time around I made the mistake of just saying “my monitor is flaky, please fix”, not knowing that “fix” now means “replace with low-res LCD” instead of “replace with identical refurb CRT”.
Given the delay, you’d better put in the “hardware refresh” request now asking for an “upgrade” to the new 2007FP … and by the time your CRT gets unusably bad, you might just get the 2007FP in the nick of time. :-)