Shame on you, John Harlan – Part 2 (of 5)

Okay,  Gateway wasn’t going to be any help so I turned to the Interwebs. As you might recall from the start of this saga, I was not the only person who had the flickering monitor problem. Real Geeks had troubleshooted (troubleshot?) the problem to a specific chip on a specific board in the monitor. Apparently there is an overheating/poor-manufacturing problem that causes the chip to pull away from the board. But the chip could be reflowed. With the help of Lon Jungemann,  I gave this a try. It did not work. So now, instead of a monitor that flickered, I had a monitor that just stayed black. Not necessarily an improvement.

Oh well, I tried. I was about to throw it in the trash recycle it responsibly when I recalled reading when I was searching for a fix that people did actually repair these. So on the off chance that someone would need parts, I put it on eBay. I didn’t want to disappoint anyone, so it had a big, “not working. for parts only” in the listing. In fact, I didn’t include any information on it at all. I figured that only someone who knew what they were doing would bid on so sparse a listing.

Maybe I could make $50 toward my next monitor.

That’s right, $304.99 for my broken monitor. The winning bidder was John Harlan he goes by johnslcdrepair, johnhis11_computers, xhd3000repairman43560 as well as computerguru43560 (if you’ve found this post by searching for any of those names, you’ll want to read the next parts of this post as well –how’s that for foreshadowing?), and also had several of these monitors listed on eBay. So he knew what he was getting into. He asked some questions about how I had tried to reflow the chip before he bid, so everything seemed fine.

But he didn’t pay right away, and after a week went by another bidder contacted me and said that he had recently been outbid on several of these monitors by John Harlan and wanted to know if I would sell the monitor to him if this sale fell through. We even agreed on a price (he started at $25 and I started at $304.99 and we met at $250).  So I opened a “did not pay” dispute with eBay. Shortly thereafter John sent the money via PayPal. Now, in his defense, John did tell me that he was a little tight on money and would take a few days to pay (but not more than a week). But John did win the bid, and had sent payment, so we packaged the monitor up.

I didn’t want it to arrived damaged, so we packed it in two separate boxes. One for the flat screen and speaker bar and one for the bulky stand and power supply. Lauren helped and documented the process, because it looked like it might make a good post…

Yes, that’s a screen covered with a towel then 1/2 inch thick Styrofoam then 1/8 inch thick plexiglass  then 2 layers of bubble wrap then surrounded by air bags on all sides.

You’d think everything would be well, right? .)

Read the continuing saga in part three.