Welcome to the blog of Can Sar, a Stanford CS major. This blog is made up of my thoughts on Computer Science and the computer industry, as well as ever exciting tales from my life.
I've been writing a long entry on last weekend's trip, but since it is not finish yet, I could not wait to post these amazing news. Last September I bought a beautiful Apple 20" Cinema Display (of the old design of course). As great as this display is, it has the small blemish of a broken power button, which will activate at completely random times. When the power button (which is electronic and touch sensitive) goes off for longer than 5 seconds, it hard reboots the laptop. This can happen several times a day, but also not happen for as long as a week, so demonstrating the problem to a repair shop, was very difficult. When I finally turned it in for repair, they could not find any fault with it. Since my guarantee is about to run out, I wanted to look into the possibility of just deactivating the faulty button, since tracking down the exact problem (which could be in the monitor, or adapater) promised to be extremely difficult. Though I was quite mad at Apple for not being able to have this problem easily fixed in the repair shop, I was willing to settle the issue with this "hack".
Upon going to the Apple Support website, I followed the link to the monitor support section. The first link was this page, on how to deactivate said button. I am amazed at how useful that help page was, and cannot wait to try out whether this trick will work. Now if only the display wouldn't have that 1 (barely noticable) faulty pixel at the top...
Glad to see you don't have to worry about that anymore, but if it's broken they should still replace it - how long is your warranty good for? A year?
skim this - http://www.macintouch.com/cinemadisplays03.html
It seems you're not the only one with that problem, and some people had problems with the cubes. Of course it's hard to reproduce the problem at the store when it's intermittent... maybe talk to a manager and see if you can get a new display.
Posted by Travis on September 2, 2004 03:07 PMSorry, forgot to mention that you should read the terms of the warranty before thinking about a replacement. If they won't replace the replacement and that one breaks just after the first one's warranty runs out, then you would have been better just keeping the old one with the dead pixel and the power issue. Europe has much better consumer protection laws than the US does, so if you have a working one, keep it :)
Posted by Travis on September 2, 2004 03:11 PM