For most of my childhood I had an old generic 19" television that was a hand-me-down from my parents. Before then I had an old black-and-white television, and remember coming home from an Adam Ant concert when I was really young (my sister was a big fan of his) to my father watching The Tonight Show on the living room television and marveling at how colourful the curtain behind Johnny Carson was. I was glad to have the colour TV, but it wasn't without its faults; not only did it sometimes make an annoying high-pitched sound (that disappeared if you whacked in the right place), but there was this small patch in the upper-right hand corner that sometimes went all black with a white circle around it. I'm not sure what caused the latter problem, but some things seemed to always trigger it (like Kain's sequence during the ending of Final Fantasy IV). Finally it got to be too much to deal with, so for Christmas of 1996 I asked for, and got, a brand new 19" Magnavox television.
That television stood me in good stead for over ten years, until earlier this winter it just up and died on me. Not wanting to spend too much on a replacement, I bought a floor model 20" Magnavox at Best Buy, figuring it would tide me by until I could afford something more serious. (Well, that and my room's only really designed for smaller televisions, so getting a bigger television will probably require some serious moving around of stuffs, and likely buying new furniture as well.) I know not to expect too much from floor models, but my new television is starting to have a problem similar to the one my old colour TV did. This time, though, there are patches in the upper-right and upper-left corners that are changing, only they're turning yellow. This only seems to be happening whenever I'm tuned to the Urge Radio stations on my cable box, which leads me to wonder if maybe it has something to do with the way Urge Radio sends it visual picture out, or maybe it has to do with the large splashes of single colours that they use in their visuals. I could probably test the latter by playing video games on my television, but I don't really have the time for that much video gaming these days.
Given how little I use my television these days, that's not so much of a problem for me. However, over the past week or so I've noticed that the picture on my flat panel here is sometimes becoming dimmer for brief moments. Usually it's no longer than a second or two, but it's definitely something that's catching my eye here. I realize that I use my computer a lot, and maybe I should expect my flat panel to start conking out here (particularly as it has served me so well these past few years), but until I start getting paycheques from my teaching job, I'm going to be living in fear that my flat panel will just up and die on me here. Given how much better the prices for flat panels are online as opposed to brick-and-mortar stores, if I am going to get a new flat panel, I should probably order one here soon and hope that this one holds out on me just a bit longer. Then again, I really don't know too much about flat panels, so for all I know the dimming problem may never get any worse than it is now, and as it is now it's something I can live with. I just worry that I'll be doing something really important here, and then all of a sudden I won't have anything on my screen and I'll be forced to fight my way out of whatever I'm working on, saving whatever I may have open, without actually being able to see what I'm doing.
I don't take it any of you have any advice you can offer me about fixing these problems, do you?