I am the smartest girl alive! Ok, maybe just the best tutorial follower...ha!

I'm experiencing a moment of deep self-satisfaction and I have to share with someone. I only got K and Sara's message machine so I'll just share my awesome experience with everyone!

This awesome experience DID NOT start awesome. I've been designing the invitations and I've become a little obsessed. I plopped onto the compute this morning to get crackin' and what do I find? A monitor with a blinking blue light. Nothing starts it. I restart, take plugs out and put them in, no dice. So I take to the laptop and look up my monitor. Seems this little gem (exact model and same year) has an issue with going to shit after a couple years and the "error" code is the flashing blue light. What's wrong with it? Techies disagree but there were 2 options: burned out LCD backlight or blown capacitors. Both would cost between $100-$300 to fix and a new monitor is $150 on the cheap end. It's past warranty and already broken so what the hell, I determined I'd fix it myself.

If it was an LCD issue I'd have to order so I looked up a tutorial first on how to replace capacitors. What a pain! You have to take the monitor apart, open up the guts and be sure not to get zapped by other capacitors in the process. (We're talkin around 1000 volts here, would've been a bad day.) So long as I didn't go poking metal into things that looked like batteries I figured I'd be ok; off I went!

This model really sucks for taking apart. The screws are nearly impossible to get to and the circuit board is not in an ergonomic position. But I finally got it out and what do you know? Blown capacitors. Brown juice all over. The capacitors shit themselves. At this point I realized I'd need a soldering iron, solder, 3 new capacitors and a tutorial on how to solder circuit boards. $20 and a 10 minute tutorial later I set to work.

I really didn't know if this was going to work! But I got the faulty pieces out, the new ones in, tediously put this thing back together and headed to the computer room. Plugs went into the monitor, I held my breath in anticipation and...NOTHING! Haha I went through all that and forgot to check if I plugged it back into the surge protector. Ok so I plugged that in and...SUCCESS!!! I fixed the monitor! I braved the perils of the circuit board and walked away victorious! Plus I saved a couple hundred bucks, which is GREAT because I've got this wedding thing going on.  WOOHOO!