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The submissions to this column have slowed down. There's only one this month.
I read "The Foolish Things We Do To Our Computers" and I have a story of my own.
I have a Trident 9680 display card, bought in 1996. Recently, uncertain parts of the screen were blurred in both M$ Windows and Debian/Linux. When I screen capture, some pixels' values are wrong. this makes me think the monitor is OK. If refresh, they may be clear, they may not. Finally I decided to buy a new old card, a fake S3 card and the screen is OK. the S3 card has 1M memory. I try to add 1M from the 9680 card. I used a screwdriver to get memory from 9680 and failed. I'd never added display memory before. I feared i might destroy display memory. The fake S3 had difficulty when probed by XFree86, so I plugged the 9680 back in. This time the screen is OK!
I guess that when the screwdriver touched the display
memory on 9680, static
electric charge on it might be released.
Mike ("Iron") is the Editor of Linux Gazette. You can read what he has
to say in the Back Page column in this issue. He has been a Linux enthusiast
since 1991 and a Debian user since 1995. He is SSC's web technical
coordinator, which means he gets to write a lot of Python scripts.
Non-computer interests include Ska/Oi! music and the international language
Esperanto. The nickname Iron was given to him in college--short for Iron Orr,
hahaha.
Mike Orr
Copyright © 2002, Mike "Iron" Orr.
Copying license https://www.linuxgazette.net/copying.html
Published in Issue 74 of Linux Gazette, January 2002