I now have another monitor. Like the Gateway Vivitron this one is used. The specs. are about the same as the Gateway so I gain no improvement in performance. The good thing is the price was the same as the Gateway brought a few years earlier. It came in at twenty-one dollars (tax included).
It is a Dell Trinitron (I’m beginning to think all I basically did was change brand names). I had to go to the web and look up the Pin layout because it seemed to be missing Pin nine. I found out after checking the Pinouts that it did not have a pin nine by design so all was okay.
I also saw a Compaq V75 monitor for twenty dollars. If a pin was missing from the Dell I would have went back and picked up the Compaq monitor.
My dad wants another monitor so I will probably pick the V75 or buy a model of Dell that is different from mine. There were quite a few Dell monitors in stock.
There were some ancient computers there also. They were selling 233 megahertz CPU, 3.2 gig hard drive, floppy drive and CD rom drive computers for ten dollars. I did not look for a modem or NIC card within these machines. A ten gig hard drive would have made these computers more than worth the ten dollars. With 3.2 gigs they could be used for running a firewall among other things.
Now it is time to run some checks on the Gateway 2000 Vivitron to try and figure out exactly what happened since I could not detect any reason for the problem.
There are two new things I can conclude now. A CRT monitor can go bad without any outward signs of a problem, without the introduction of any substance through the slots of the monitor cabinet (by substance I mean water, dirt etc) and without violent movement or a fall from a high place. The monitor could look fine on the outside and still be defective.
This last statement may seem obvious even for new monitors but it is not. To watch a monitor slowly go bad (that formally worked fine) before my eyes without any evident cause is weird.
My other conclusion concerns the pinouts of a 15 pin video connector. All manufacturers of CRT monitors do not include all 15 Pins meaning all fifteen Pins are not used by all brands of monitors so the lack of 15 Pins does not necessarily mean a 15 Pin connector is missing Pins.
When searching for used monitors, I use to look at the 15 Pin connectors to see if they were missing Pins and if they were I would assume they were defective. Now I know that some manufacturers do not have all fifteen pins on the 15 Pin connector and the lack of fifteen Pins does not mean that some are missing.