Photograph: Filming Dolphin

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An Extended Life for my HP 17″ CRT Monitor

For about five months my hp pavilion mx704 17″ monitor had been having problems.  All of a sudden it’s normal bright colors would go away, and it its place, there would be a tint of yellow, red, green or pink.  When it had the bright red tint color it was almost impossible to read black text.

I called HP’s Customer Support in Miami and they suggested I dump my CRT monitor and buy a new LCD flat-screen monitor.  My current monitor was too old and would not be economically feasible to repair it.

I received the same advice from computer dealers in Panama City and even computer repair shops.  “Old technology should not be repaired” was the repeated response from my advisors.  That is, until I found a nice Chinese fellow at El Dorado  The name of his place is:

Planet Computer Store, Centro Comercial La Alhambra Local 3, P.O. Box 87-3848, Zona 7, Panamá.  Telfax (507)260-0056, Phone 260-0083.

I’m sorry but I didn’t get his name.  He told me to bring in my damaged monitor and he would fix it for around $35.00.  The final cost was $36.75 included a VAT of 5 percent.  The official guarantee is of thirty days, even though he is almost positive that my monitor could easily last three more years.

When I got home, about four hours ago, I connected the monitor and the colors were exactly the same as when the monitor was new way back in 2005.  I’m so happy that by faithful companion is back in service with flying colors.

The morale of this story is don’t believe everything you hear.  Keep on investigating and you will find knowledgeable people who can save you a couple of bucks.  I was already thinking of considering the following options:

1.  HP w1907-19″ Widescreen Flat Panel Monitor.  The price for this monitor at Multimax is $346.47 including the VAT tax.  The HP Pavilion w1907 is a 19-inch wide-screen with liquid crystal display (LCD) and thin-film transistor (TFT) screen.

2.  Samsung SyncMaster 920LM - 19″ monitor LCD Widescreen, 1,440×900.  The price for this monitor at Yoytec is $178.40.

As you can see, I made a good savings fixing my old monitor.  With that savings I intend to buy two memory cards of 1GB each.  Yoytec sells them at $47.24 each incluing the VAT tax and a video card XFX Nvidia Geforce 850GT, 1GN,GDDR2 128Bit, TV-out, DVI, HDTV, DX10, PCI Express x 16.  Yoyotec sells this video card at $99.65 including the VAT tax.

This is going to be my next purchase for my Birthday present on December 16, 2008.  That means that in 2009, I will have a better performing computer and a brand new digital camera.  It just can’t get any better than this.  Good Day!

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