A type of expansion card (either ISA or PCI) which can be installed in a computer to display the result of the computer's POST (Power-on Self Test) on a small LCD or LED readout. This is device can be extremely valuable to any computer technician because it allows him or her to view the value that the POST returns without a working monitor. This is not only important for logistic reasons (lugging around a monitor to each computer to be tested) but also because certain an error returned by the POST could have something to do with a monitor not working. It is true that the computer's speaker will often beep the POST code out in a sort of poor man's Morse code but, the speaker may not be functioning and secondly, counting all those beeps can be a major pain.

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