[BarryE]

I have an old LaCie monitor (324) that's developed a fault. It started with a pair of flickering, coloured lines about half the width of the screen. After enduring this for a while, another pair popped up towards the bottom, followed by a block of lines.

After testing for the obvious, I determined the fault was internal to the monitor, so I took a look inside. I wondered if I'd find any blown capacitors, but I didn't.

The monitor has been well used over about 10 years, so I've had my monies worth. It would be nice if I could repair it so it could be used as a backup.

Anyone any thoughts on what the fault might be?

Many thanks

[WorksAsIntended]

I see three points.
The simplest one would be the interface between the chip and the panel. They are often line by line, so if you loose a bit of contact this might be the outcome.
More likely the stack of the chip has some errors.
You may look at the chip soldering too.

[BarryE]

I see three points.
The simplest one would be the interface between the chip and the panel. They are often line by line, so if you loose a bit of contact this might be the outcome.
More likely the stack of the chip has some errors.
You may look at the chip soldering too.

The lines appeared in groups over several weeks. This seems likely to be indicative, but what it shows I don't know.

Thanks for input. No sure what you mean by "More likely the stack of the chip has some errors". Sorry if being dim.

I checked cables etc were seated OK, but as the monitors not been moved for all that time, this seemed unlikely. The "interface" was where I was thinking. I assumed that some sort of driver chip was controlling portions of the display and that each chip would likely have a cap associated with it.

Does chip soldering fail after time?

[WorksAsIntended]

Chip soldering failing is quite uncommon, but it can happen.

There is a micro chip inside the monitor. This has to do some calculations and has a memory part for that which called stack (kind of like the cpus inner ram, but it is hard to explain its exact nature without going into a lot of details). However, a faulty stack is not all too uncommon with microchips and part of the data might just be lost on the way.

I dont think there are mutliple chips doing the job, this sounds too complex for the work to be done.


It will be very hard to find the real reason and you will have to get a lot of data on the board for it to find shorts, wrong resistances, maybe even bad phases.


You might want to get a new one instead, unfortunally.

[leekil]

You could try rubbing the monitor with your finger, in the areas where the lines are. Rubbing maybe near the edge, where they start? Though usually issues like that are vertical lines, not horizontal.