I degaussed an old arcade monitor a while back using an electric drill. The degauss circuit in here had burnt out - the thermal sensor to stop you constantly degaussing had fried.
It’s pretty simple - just power up the drill without bit and slowly move away from the screen.
tim
How long will it be before the next new Doper is Degausser?
Every response to a thread will just disa
i just did mine again. I suppose it’s like seeing someone yawn, it becomes an incontrovertible need.
I haven’t degaussed a tv in years. But I used to watch my dad do it when he had a tv repair shop (yes, THAT long ago.)
And I loved the old mechanical car radios. Set your tuner, pull out a button, push it in, and you’re set.
Many years ago, a friend rearranged his dorm room while his roommate was out of town. Made efficient use of space by putting the microwave above the (roommate’s) TV. The sort of thing that he could see in retrospect (being a physics major) why it would be a bad idea.
Somehow, the degaussing fell to me, since I was vaguely familiar with the idea, and had once even seen a degausser. He found a speaker magnet, and I switched the TV to a blank blue screen, and sat in front of the TV drunk using the magnet to chase the colors off the screen. Eventually, we decided it was close enough. And moved the microwave.
Even after CRTs improved to the point that the dot was no longer a giveaway, there was (and still is) the matter of heat. All my parents had to do was feel the back of the set to know I’d been watching. The set was always slightly warm, due to the instant-on feature which kept the cathode filaments hot when the set was off, but you could easily tell when it had been on for more than several minutes.
I donate platelets every few weeks. There’s tv’s at each pheresis station. The one at the end that I usually get stuck* at needs degaussing badly. I keep trying to remember to take a big magnet in…
*Ha! an inadvertant pun!
I loved to degauss user’s monitors, and defrag their hard drive. It was pure magic. It looked impressive and it made them happy. Sure I would fix the problem they complained of if possible, but if the fix was not complicated some users felt I was not taking them seriously. I found that after an easy fix, if the user seemed skeptical that the issue was fully fixed, degaussing and a defrag would make them feel better.
Oh, lord, yes. I remember when having a degauss button on a monitor was a factor in favor of its purchase.
Other fun technology bits I recall wistfully are the extra program I downloaded to park my hard drive’s heads on shutdown (there was an actual audible “thud”), and “stacker”-type hard drive doubling programs. Remember how expensive hard drives were at one time, and how people were beside themselves when Stacker came out, a program that would compress and decompress your programs on the fly, so that suddenly you could fit 80 megs worth of stuff onto your old 40 meg drive? At a time when a 105-meg drive cost almost $400, that was a heck of a deal. Of course, if something went wrong, your entire hard drive became completely unrecoverable, but in the meantime, you were livin’ large!