

Not long ago, I was working on the review of the Gateway XHD3000 30-inch monitor. Like the other behemoth desktop displays, 27-inch and up, the Gateway doesn’t rotate, so attaching the DVI connector is something of a chore. Every monitor in the known universes seems to be designed with recessed connectors, making that critical cable connection even more annoying.

XHD3000 Connections
Naturally, I was in a hurry go get this thing fired up. So I shoved in the cable—hey, the angle seemed right! Curiously, screwing down the locking connectors seemed to take a little bit more force than usual, but it seemed to screw in just fine. From what I could see, the connector shell was straight and not crooked.

So I fired up the PC, only to be greeted with a gloriously trashed image. It was broken up, smeared, and the color saturation was all wrong. I almost picked up the phone to call Gateway and complain about the defective monitor.

Some friendly goddess of small lucks stayed my hand, and instead whispered in my ear that maybe, just maybe, I should look at the DVI connector.

It was really hard to spot, since displays with 2560×1600 resolution require dual-link DVI cables. One pin had bent right at the point where it connected to the bottom of the shell, at nearly a right angle. Then it was bent again at a right angle, and exactly parallel with another pin. So at first glance, the bent pin and the adjacent pin looked like a single pin. It took a bit of fine motor coordination with a tiny pair of tweezers to straighten out the pin.

This time around, I inserted the DVI connector carefully. It slid on with very little force, and the locking connectors also screwed in fine. When I fired up the system, the display looked just fine, thank you.

At first blush, the lesson here is that if it feels like you’re using too much force, you generally are. However, it’s not a universal lesson, because sometimes you do need a lot of force. Joel Durham was recently stymied when he tried to open up AMD’s reference DTX case. It turned out that he needed to use a seemingly excessive amount of force to pry open the system.

In general, though, if it feels like you’re using enough force to break something, that’s probably what will happen.

Hmm. Red to Red, Blue to Blue
Not long ago, Jason Cross wrote an article about getting his girlfriend to build her own computer. Everything went smashingly well, except a little glitch with front panel power and reset connectors. I’ll let Jason take the story from here:

Glenda building her computer

“When Glenda was building her PC for the “girlfriend PC” article, she looked at the front panel connectors on the case for power, reset, HDD light, etc. They’re colored. There were colors on the motherboard headers for the front panel. So she simply matched up the colors and went with that.

“Of course, there is still no standardization for those basic front panel connectors at all, so nobody is to say that blue is reset instead of, say, the HDD access light. When the machine wouldn’t power on at all, she was very frustrated because she “did everything right.” We figured it out pretty quick, but it really highlights the need to read your motherboard manual when building a PC. And the need for a standard front-panel header block, I guess.”

At first blush, an experience system builder would just snort, and mutter, “noob.” But that misses the point: stuff like this should be standard. By the same token, Glenda learned a pretty valuable system building lesson, and did it without frying her brand new PC. The moral here is that don’t assume standardization exists unless you can confirm it. The secondary lesson: RTFM. Continued…