VCF Southeast 2024 Southern Fried Gaming Expo 

16:43 This is neat. I really wish I could go back in time and visit the computer store I used to haunt in my early teenage years. It was in part of a larger shopping complex. The main department store was on one end of a long building, with its main entrance in the middle, shared with an indoor gallery of small boutique shops and a food court. At the opposite far end of the hall, there was an arcade and the computer shop. My school bus had a stop next to that complex, and I would go to the store's electronics department and hang out in the AV room playing with all the surround sound stuff and watching LaserDisc demos on the projection TV. Then I would head all the way to the other side of the building and play with the demo computers, admire the wall of hardware upgrades (crappy old AdLib for sixty, Sound Blaster for a hundred-and-change, and.. ah... the Sound Blaster Pro deluxe kit -- you will be mine some day.) That is where I bought my first computer -- an AST Advantage 486SX/25. 2MB of not-enough-RAM, 80MB of not-enough-HDD, no sound card, no CD-ROM, a 14" CRT that could either do 800x600 non-interlaced, or 1024x768 interlaced. I loved that computer so much because it was all mine, and hated it so much because it was always out of memory and HDD space. There was a 4MB upgrade kit for the basically-infinite sum of a hunny-and-sixty-five. Me and my dad were pretty convinced it was special proprietary RAM, but when I recently tracked one down on the Bay, nope, it was pretty happy to take almost any of my 72-pin SIMMs. Those are all precious memories that I will dearly miss when I go senile some day.

Me, when walking by the slide rule display: "heh.. nerds.

It is likely the 5 flashes you are seeing is a power fault - at least if my experience with their commercial displays is anything to go by. When I have seen it I have found that it isn't necessary a fault with the power supply itself but rather the supply shutting down due to overcurrent because of a failure in the LED backlight array. Very disappointing for displays that are supposed to be rated for 24x7 operation for at least 5 years - we have gotten less than 2 years out of them in some cases. Samsung will honor their warranty for this issue but it yours is a consumer display it may be out of warranty (commercial displays have much longer warranties.) The problem got so bad that the place where I work now refuses to purchase any Samsung displays. We have replaced almost all of them with NEC/Sharp commercial displays which are actually much nicer from a configuration and remote management standpoint.