I bought three H233H LCD monitors at the same time for our workstations at home a few years ago. One of them sat unused for a couple of years when my daughter left the state so I decided to use it for testing PCs I was working on.
I was working on one the other day that seemed to have a display card problem because the H233H would start up normally and do all of it's self-tests but then would go into powersave mode telling me there was problems with the card or DVI cable. So I shut the monitor down, replaced the card, hooked it up to a different VGA-only monitor and all appeared OK. Then I hooked it up to the H233H.
This time all of the lights on the front panel came on instead of going through the 'step-through' when it self tests. Then the monitor started displaying full screens of single colors cycling through red, green, blue, and then black, and then started the colored-screen cycle all over again as if it's stuck in an infinite loop. This happened with either the VGA or DVI cables connected and the computer powered up and of course the initial bootup text from the computer couldn't be displayed.
The only button that seemed to be working was the "Input" button because it would cause the monitor to attempt to sense a signal on all three ports, but then it would close that corner display and continue cycling through the colors. None of the other buttons are functional, meaning there's no access to the configuration Menu and the OSD.
After disconnecting the video cable from the monitor, disconnecting the AC power cord for about 15 minutes and then powering it up without the video cable connected hoping that it would normalize, I discovered that it continued not to self-test and start cycling full screens of color. I've seen display tests that cycle through the monitor's primary colors so that's why I was thinking it was stuck in some sort of test mode.
Has anyone seen this happen before?
Is there a way to 'reset' the control processor in the monitor? Is there a way to communicate with the control processor directly from one of the video ports like I've seen in a few other monitors?
There is a power-on sequence mentioned in the service manual for another Acer monitor that will put the monitor in "Factory OSD mode". Is this available in the H233H?
This was a spare monitor so I'm not in any rush to replace it. But before I tear into it to see if there are any bulged or blown electrolytics in the power supply or other internal issues I may be able to handle, I'd like to know if there are any alternatives.
Anybody?
