This happened sometime in
March, just before
Spring Break.
I had just sat down at my
computer and hadn't even opened an
application yet. I was just moving the
mouse around idly, when all of a sudden the
screen went
blank.
"That's odd," I thought, "the screen doesn't usually do that..."
I pressed a few keys on the
keyboard and started moving the
mouse around, figuring the
monitor somehow went into power saving
mode. All of a sudden...
BOOM!
I jumped out of my chair, stood motionless for a moment, and then dove for the
surge protector and hit the
emergency shutoff button. The screen didn't actually
explode, per say, but the sound definitely came from inside the monitor and I could swear I was starting to smell
smoke. I called my
friend up to help me assess the
damage. We couldn't find anything outwardly wrong, so we waited another five minutes and then valiantly tried to power up the
system again. The PC was fine, but the picture on the screen had resolved itself into a single
horizontal line. (I somehow still managed to input my
BIOS password and boot up
Windows to run Norton.)
We got an
ancient monitor out of the storage room--the thing must've been at least ten years old--and to my amazement, the thing actually worked once I turned the
resolution down. We took the old monitor apart--the main board had *completely* burned itself out. It was actually
charred and
blackened. So, like any good
American, we threw it off the side of the building into the adjacent
alley, and that was the end of that.