You know you have cheap hardware when…

So finally bit the “but it’s over £100” bullet and bought a new TFT monitor the other day. The monitor in question was a nice-looking 19-incher for roughly £110 (with free shipping to boot). I ordered it from eBuyer, choosing the delivery option that equated to “get it to me whenever”.

Two days later I got my delivery. Only briefly stopping to comment on the speedy delivery time to Kenny, I hastily unpacked the new hardware. I’m like a kid like that sometimes. However, I was slightly surprised to find that the monitor was a widescreen 19″. Not unpleasantly so, just that it hadn’t been advertised as such. In any case I took the time to set it up on my (now kind cluttered) desk and after fooling around with the cables, fired it up.

Except it didn’t turn on. It took me a good few minutes of poking and prodding to get the power button to give me any kind of response. It, along with the other front panel buttons, are the molded plastic type with a very specific pressure point near the back. If you can use them with no trouble you can probably also pull off the Vulcan nerve pinch. So I eventually get it working, and decide to have a cursory glance at the manual. The first line I read worried me somewhat:

Hardware Installation

Be carefully to your LCD monitor, it’s very exquisite but easy to broken.

Okay. It’s at this point I realise what I have is Cheap Hardware™. Still it does it’s job – even better now that I’ve told Windows to handle it rather than nVidia’s control panel. I’m slightly irked that the maximum resolution is less than what I wanted, which was 1280×1024 – or the widescreen equivalent. As long as it does its job I’m satisfied though.

PS: The product listing appears to mention both the maximum resolution and the fact that it is a widescreen in the title. Why I failed to notice both of these is beyond me. Maybe I had it confused with this one. I did have quite a few tabs open…

For £110 beggars can’t be choosers!