Chris Calabrese – My Blog

Back when I was using CRT computer monitors I always used a screen saver. The reason was, if you left a static image on your computer screen long enough it would actually etch itself into the glass. But that was long ago. Modern LCD monitors don’t suffer from screen burn in—or so I thought.

It turns out that LCD monitors can get a type of burn-in similar to CRT monitors. I discovered this the other day when I closed my web browser after a long session of surfing and saw a faint ghost of the image on my Dell 2005FPW monitor. I was in mild shock, and immediately ran to Google to see what I could find.

I discovered that the LCD version of screen burn-in is called “image persistence.” There is a Wikipedia article that explains it in detail. The good news is, unlike CRT burn-in, LCD image persistence is not permanent. When I turned my monitor off overnight it went away.

I’ve been using LCD monitors for years, so why had I never noticed this before? Apparently Apple monitors suffer from this problem to a greater degree than most others, and since my Dell monitor has the same internal workings as an Apple (one of the reasons I bought it) I now get to experience this very minor annoyance for the very first time. Apple has a page on their website with tips on how to avoid it.

With the advent of LCDs I had thought screen savers were now mere eye candy, but they still serve the purpose for which they were originally intended: keeping the ghosts out of my monitor.

I bought a USB external hard drive for my Dell 8400 PC. It didn’t work. It acted like it was working, but when I tried to save data to it it would just hang there. I was getting error messages like “Delayed write failed: Windows was unable to save all the data for the file…” and a few others I wished I’d written down but didn’t.

I finally figured out the problem (or at least the fix). My monitor has a USB hub built in to it. It was connected, even though I wasn’t using it. When I unplugged the hub, the drive started working properly.

It looks like my Dell 8400 is very finicky about what’s plugged into the USB ports. I’ve since tried a couple of USB devices, and those have caused problems with the external drive when I’ve tried to use them both at the same time.

Now that I’ve figured out the problem, the drive, a Western Digital My Book, has been working perfectly. It also looks cool sitting on my desk. The only niggle I have with it is that it occasionally clicks itself off after a period of sitting idle, presumable to save power or extend the drive life. When I want to access the drive again I have to wait for it to spin up. A minor annoyance, and I am otherwise very satisfied with this drive.