VGA Monitor Repair

This morning when I entered the studio one of my screens acted a bit strange. It switched on and of immediately again and then it tried again. I hesitated for about 15 second and then decided to go and try to repair it myself first. I saw this behavior before with the Behringer REV-2496 I repaired a while ago, so I suspected the power supply right away. But the biggest challenge turned out to open it up. The case is made of plastic and it all fits very tight. This took me about an hour :)

When it was open it was easy to spot the power supply and a closer investigation showed me two electrolytic capacitors right away that looked suspicious. On the top they are not flat anymore, but it looks like their are under pressure. Usually those are the bad guys. So I took the power supply PCB with me to the local electronics shop and took new capacitors with a bit higher voltage rating than the original with me.

And here is the lot that I took out. I actually replaced all of them just to be safe. It was about 5 euro's worth of material so I could take a chance with that. Luckily the power supply PCB is a single sided one, so de-soldering the capacitors was quite easy. When the new ones were in I switched it on and nothing happened. Oops.. Did I do something wrong? Instinctively I felt all the capacitors and one got very warm. So I switched the power off immediately. And then I saw I put it in the wrong orientation. Stupid me.

I de-soldered that one again and took a new one to replace it. Again just to be on the safe side. And then I could only hope that this stupid mistake didn't break anything else. But luckily that was not the case. I guess I was quick enough powering it down again. So after that I reassembled the whole thing again. That was a lot easier by the way than taking it apart since now I understood how the construction worked. And here is another picture with a fully operational VGA monitor again :) Now back to work!