[GTALUG] GTA Monitor Repairs

[Clifford Ilkay]

Hello,

I purchased a new 4k Wasabi Mango UHD420 monitor on eBay from Korea in 
May and now it needs service. It's not feasible to ship this 42" monster 
back to Korea for service. I have a SquareTrade warranty that will cover 
local repairs. Does anyone know of any repair shops in the GTA or 
someone who will come out to my place to fix this thing?

If you're curious how this works with Linux, I had to upgrade my video 
card to a GeForce 960. I bought an ASUS because that's the only 
manufacturer that has local RMA, apparently. I had to install the binary 
driver. It didn't work with Fedora 20. I didn't waste any time 
troubleshooting it and just did a clean install of Fedora 21. I keep 
/home on a separate partition so I was back in business in under 20 
minutes. All I had to do to make the fonts look right in KDE was to 
check "Force fonts DPI" and set it to 105 in System Settings>>Fonts.

When this monitor works, it's beautiful. Unfortunately, it appears the 
electronics in this thing are half-baked. Within a week, the screen 
started losing sync on the right side and eventually died on the right 
side. It's an interesting failure mode because this is one panel, not 
two. I offered to replace the defective parts if the eBay vendor shipped 
them to me. They were only too happy to do that because under the terms 
of the sale, they would have had to pay shipping both ways, which I'm 
guessing for something this size would easily be $200. They sent me a 
new video board and I replaced it in about half an hour. From the time 
the monitor failed to the time it was running again was just under two 
weeks. The vendor seems to answer no more than one email every 24 to 48 
hours.

That board worked perfectly until July when I started seeing "tearing" 
all over the screen as it momentarily lost sync. I reported this to the 
vendor and they wanted a video of it happening to do anything about it. 
It wasn't happening in a predictable or frequently enough that I 
bothered. Last week, the "tearing" got worse and there was a new 
symptom. The brightness would fluctuate on its own. (I had turned off 
adaptive brightness because it didn't work well for me.) This progressed 
to the screen going completely dark with a regular popping noise coming 
from the internal speakers. If I turn off the monitor and let it cool 
down, it will turn on again and the loss of sync and eventually going 
black cycle will be repeated.

-- 
Regards,

Clifford Ilkay

+1 647-778-8696