I’m on a roll! I’ve gotten three things to work that were headed for the scrap heap:
- My dad’s Gateway notebook computer. It’s maybe 5 years old, running Windows XP Home. It had slowed to an agonizing crawl, and my dad was thinking about tossing it.
- My old Dell P991 Ultrascan monitor. Maybe 6-7 years old. It was working okay, but it couldn’t show a true “black,” and there were these tiny green diagonal lines spaced apart by two inches or so. Really annoying, but I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away.
- My old Zenith color TV. Maybe 8+ years old. It was working fine, but then one day, the greens started looking blue, and the picture in general had an orange tint.
Here’s how I fixed them, without spending a dime:
It turns out that the old Gateway computer was the victim of the security suite that comes with Verizon FiOS. (My dad had recently switched over from Optimum Online.) I uninstalled the Verizon bloatware, and all of a sudden the notebook was blazing fast. (I subsequently installed Microsoft’s free Security Essentials software, which apparently has a way smaller footprint than the Verizon package.)
I fixed my Ultrascan monitor by rolling the driver back to the OEM driver that came with the monitor all those years ago. I then used the “color return” feature, and the monitor is now as good as ever, with true black and without those unbelievably annoying green lines.
I fixed my old Zenith color TV by unplugging it (literally pulling the plug out of the socket), and leaving it unplugged for 2 hours. (I found this tip somewhere or other on the internet — it acts as a hard reset.) Amazingly, when I plugged it in again, the greens had come back.
Hope this helps!
