Originally posted by: mwmorph
actually dont do that to your car. it is supposed to be driven anywhere from 3000(camry) to 5000(RX8) miles very gently(not above 4000rpm(camry), 5000rpm(RX8) according to ll manuals.
Oh I didn't mean you should drive your car very harshly for the first few weeks. You don't need to anyway, since most cars I know of have a warranty that lasts longer than that. It's different with monitors though because some warranties (i.e. zero dead pixel guarantees, or if nothing else, a brick and mortar's replacement and/or money-back satisfaction guarantee) only lasts a few weeks. So I was just saying that if you're under one of those warranties, to stress out the monitor in the beginning, to really test it out to its limits, then never approach those limits again (for maximum life of monitor and minimum chance of new dead pixels appearing) once the warranty expires. Then again, it's also possible that stressing the system primes dead pixels for failure over time. That's always the case with any sort of destructive testing, which is essentially what you're doing here (except not testing to actual destruction). But given that most dead pixels appear fairly early, with few later on, I'd rather take my chances and stress out my monitor in the beginning if I have such a warranty. Naturally, if you don't, you might as well as play nice rather than introducing dead pixels by making the monitor go to settings that you never use.
I remember testing out one of our display monitors, by doing something which made the monitor blink and other weird stuff. Shortly thereafter, I noticed that it had developed a green bright subpixel -- after quite a few months of sitting there in the lobby running screensavers continually. So it may possible for new ones to develop afterwards; however, it's also possible that the screensaver never really tested the monitor to its limits (duh...it's just the stock aquarium screensaver), and that it had been primed for a dead pixel since it was made, but simply never reached the "breaking point" until I made it do weird stuff. I don't know. Until then, though, the monitor never had any dead pixels. The sales guys weren't too happy with me. Oh well. I had an AOC 15" which had 2 dead pixels first time I turned it on, but they never bothered me. No new ones appeared for the next 3 years I had it though. I now use an Amptron G19FP, which has never had any dead pixels develop. So with my small sample size of 2 monitors, I haven't had any dead pixels develop over time. And no I'm not going to tell you what I was doing making the monitor go crazy, in case it's inadvertently a way to generate new dead pixels =P
So what to stress it out with, you ask? Well, I don't really know the answer to this question. I'm guessing that you'd probably want to alternate white/black (no point using color because you might as well as test out all three colors at once i.e. white), after leaving it in one and then the other for a while (leaving it in black for a while and not just white is important I think). I don't know if you got a program that does random white/black though (i.e. DisplayMate I think). If you're bored though and got no idea for a screensaver that'll alternate white/black, you can always try out Wizmo from grc.com (
http://www.grc.com/wizmo/wizmo.htm ) since they got a nice Graviton screen saver. I used to sink hours into it playing around with the settings, then watching all the particles gradually coalesce from being evenly distributed across the screen to a spherical ball of little balls all under each other's gravity (I didn't watch it continually, just the first few minutes, then check up on it every so often). I have no life.
Chuck Hsiao
Formerly of Amptron