The submissions to this column have slowed down. There's only one this month.
I read "The Foolish Things We Do To Our Computers" and I have a story of my own.
I have a Trident 9680 display card, bought in 1996. Recently, uncertain parts of the screen were blurred in both M$ Windows and Debian/Linux. When I screen capture, some pixels' values are wrong. this makes me think the monitor is OK. If refresh, they may be clear, they may not. Finally I decided to buy a new old card, a fake S3 card and the screen is OK. the S3 card has 1M memory. I try to add 1M from the 9680 card. I used a screwdriver to get memory from 9680 and failed. I'd never added display memory before. I feared i might destroy display memory. The fake S3 had difficulty when probed by XFree86, so I plugged the 9680 back in. This time the screen is OK!
I guess that when the screwdriver touched the display
memory on 9680, static
electric charge on it might be released.