[Johnny] There was a monitor that he particularly liked. The whole monitor looks dead, and he decides to open it and find out what’s wrong. She fixed it using a hair dryer – sort -. While we think his explanation of the problem is unlikely, we hate Armchair Quarterback and we applaud him for opening it up and making it work.
When something dies, it is always a good idea to check the power and power supply, but in this case it did not pan out. In fact, the inside of the power supply board looks like a reasonable voltage value. The problem must be something more subtle.
The interface board has a pair of low dropout controllers, and [Johnny] Suspicion has become one of them. We don’t fully understand his paragraph about LDOs getting old and not being able to reactivate with cool current if the material is not hot enough. On the other hand, heating the ingredients with a hair dryer seems to fix them. We suspect it may just be a failed solder joint, but it works regardless of the explanation.
Apparently, the problem happens again and again and fixes it by heating the case spot next to the controller. It’s hard to be sure what’s going on without seeing it directly, but we’re still going to bet on a flashy solder joint. If you want to argue for or against conjecture, we’re sure there will be plenty of discussion in the comments.
There was a time when it was easy to work in consumer gear and it was relatively easy to find schematics. Nowadays everything is small, hard to replace if you find replacements, and service documentation is rare. But you can still get lucky sometimes. You just have to try.
We have noticed a trend of hair care products for repair. Sometimes repairs can seem mysterious, an infamous phenomenon of being more or less.