Things That Make You Say "Hmmmm..."

Some things just don't make any sense, and this week brought a pair of them to me.

No sooner do I post my positive experience with my DVR, the Philips 3575, does it develop a weird issue. I'm watching a DVD while recording something to the hard drive, which I've accomplished before without incident. Suddenly, the disc stops playing, the recording stops, and I've got some weird, white screen up on my TV mentioning some type of system error. Not only that, but the machine is completely frozen, and I can't even get the disc out. I finally have to plug and unplug the machine to reset it, and while the disc responds then, I navigate over to the hard drive, and everything that I recorded previously isn't there! Clearly, a catastrophic hard drive failure has visited me. I then watch the rest of the disc on the Philips, realizing that it's probably toast.

After the film, I head on over to my desktop (thinking that it's a good thing to have a nice LCD display as I'll be watching more TV online without a DVR). When I turn it on, I notice that my monitor has a weird pattern of vertical lines completely across it. Yup, Windows starts, and it's not going away. No, it's not the dreaded safe mode of Windows with the limited color palette. I decide to do a little troubleshooting, as I try and compute via Braille. I plug the monitor from the graphics card into the desktop's on board graphics, but the pattern remains. I then try to plug the monitor into my notebook's video out, and the same lines sit there. I'm a little befuddled as this monitor has been bullet proof since I got it, and performed without a hiccup along the way. I wonder if it might be the VGA cable, but I futz with it and it doesn't seem to make any difference.

I start thinking if I'm having some weird household electrical issue, but I recall that the computer and monitor were both off, through a surge suppressor turned off at the time of the Philips difficulty.

The next day, I find my receipts, and start to get some help, as both are under warranty still. First to the Philips. I call their customer support, and they were refreshingly helpful. I confidently blurt out "My hard drive is dead." The tech guy asks what the machine did, and agrees I'm probably right, but asks me to try something first. We unplug the machine for a full minute, and plug it back in to do a system reset. The machine then is back to normal, and the content on the hard drive seems to be there, and playable. Could it really be that simple? The only residue I've noticed so far is that the blue hard drive recording light seems to have gone out, but it was too bright anyway, so I wouldn't RMA the machine just for that.

Now to the monitor. I go to the Acer support site, and I get approved for the send back. I decide to make sure that there's nothing I need off of my desktop, as it could be sans monitor for the next month, and I don't have a spare these days. As I do this, I'm surprised that the display is completely normal! I run the computer for over an hour, and the weird pattern of vertical lines doesn't return.

While I'm pleased as punch that both the Philips DVR, and the LCD monitor are back to their usual state of health, I'm simply at a loss to explain what might have happened. Is this one for the X-Files?

--Jonas

Update: Jan '08- The DVR continues to function fine. Here's what happened to the monitor.