Intangibles

Today, my venerable Dell U2410 decided that it's time to go south, flickered the backlight a few times, and shut it off for good. As miracles happen, a friend of mine loaned me an LG 27EA83R-D. New and shiny, out of the box, installed, connected, turned on, the image is sharp and nice, everything's peachy.

...until just a *little* bit later.

OMG.

What a PITA.

Thing is, there were features in that Dell that I took for granted, not even realizing they're there, that make a night and day difference in day to day work.

First of all, there must be a special circle in hell for industrial designers that put sensor switches out of sight, with markings that are barely visible in bright daylight, forget home office at night. An attempt to change settings is an exercise in futility.

Second - imagine my surprise when after waking up from DPMS sleep, I found all the windows, carefully placed on the screen, hurled at random at the other screen. Reason? 27EA83R-D simply drops off the face of Earth when it goes to DPMS sleep. And tells Windows about it. Windows is ever happy to rearrange your windows for you.

Third, the corollary of the second - it's a good thing my always-on, critical-hardware-controlling devices were plugged into my *other* (also Dell) monitor that understands that it is impolite to shut off USB power just when the monitor goes to sleep (and that, by the way, used to happen after just one minute of inactivity). Because LG doesn't, and thinks it's just fine to shut *everything* off.

Oh well.

Understand me right, I'm not bashing LG - they made their design decisions, and I didn't vote with my dollars this time, so I can't really complain. It is just to remind you that the devil is in the details, and looking at the pretty picture on Internet and a better price is not necessarily going to get you the result you hoped for.