Jeckles Geek Blog

I didn’t notice it at first.  It’s subtle and you miss it.  A bit of bad luck, a tough break here or there.

A Virus, then another.
Smart phone breaking.
Xbox 360 gets the infamous Red Ring of Death.

After a while it sinks in.  I’ve the got the tech whammy.  Shit is breaking left and right.  This is beyond bad luck.  The straw that broken the camel’s back: my televison.

My 65 inches of High Def joy.  My monstrous rear projection CRT.  My $3000 plus indulgence for the love of football and movies.  My television was broken.  It is over four years old, but for that much money it is going to have to last longer than that.

It wouldn’t turn on.  The Power Button just sat there and blinked green.  I unplugged it, waited a minute and then plugged it back in, this had worked in the past.  Blinking Green Light.  I hit the System Reset Button.  Blinking Green Light.   I tried various  combination of powering it off, unplugging it, hold down buttons and reseting it.  The result was always the same.  Blinking Green Light.

I called Mitsubishi.  The TV is out of warranty.  Beyond the old unplug trick and the old reset trick there was nothing they could do.  The service center for the place I bough it from is what I needed, says Mitsubishi.  Any clue what the problem could be, asks I.  Impossible to say.

I call the store I  bought from.  The service center is closed.  He’ll fax my ticket in and they’ll call me in the morning.  Any idea what the problem is?  Blinking green light?  No idea.

I do a google search.  Blinking Green Light of Death they call it.  Happens, apparently, to a lot of these Mitsubishi Wide Screen CRT projections.  Problem is almost always a bad DM bourd, what ever that is, and seems to cost anywhere from $300-800 to repair.

This. Can’t. Be. Happening.

I dig deeper, the problem with the DM boards seems to be bad capacitors, 4 of them on the board.  As I read I find stories of a few people who had swapped the caps themselves and were able to resolve the problem.

I can do this, I told myself.  One of the DIYers said he step by step instructions as well as teh Mitsubishi Troubleshooting guide.  I email him asking for any info he would be willing to share and then I went to bed.

The next I didn’t hear back from the DIYer or from teh service center.

I said, fuck it, and took a screw driver to the TV and started to open it up.  As I was taking the back off, I got an email with the step by step instructions.  I used them to find the DM board and remove it from the TV.  A quick eximanition confirms that the 4 caps are indeed blown.

It takes trips to 3 different Radio Shacks to get the 4 capacitors that I need.  Capt Shutter comes to offer and a hand ( and to see if I electrocute myself.) It takes a while with my shaky hand but get eht old caps desoldered and then solder the new ones on.

Snap the board back and fire the TV up and to my wonder it comes back to life.

I never did hear from the service center.  And I think that I need to call Mitsubishi back and tell them that for three grand, they can put in caps that will hold up.  I will not purchase anything from Mitsushi again.  Nor will I purchase anyting from  the Big Screen store again.

But it works and that is great.  It amazes me that the problem was that small… and that I was able to adress it.  But I’m pissed that the company would have a design flaw like that and not do thier best to support customers that run into that issue.

And I’ve got shake this tech whammy.