We picked up a second-hand Gate­way com­puter around the begin­ning of the year (it’s great build qual­ity, and uses less than 90W of power… but if any of the com­po­nents in it died we might be a bit screwed! Mind you, at least it has plenty of PCI slots, unlike some.), along with its orig­i­nal mon­i­tor, a 15″ Gate­way EV500.

I’m pretty sure they were rebadg­ing Sony mon­i­tors even when this thing was made, so it’s prob­a­ble there’s another model num­ber that goes with it, but per­haps not. Basi­cally, I used it because it went with the com­puter and, at that time, we didn’t have any other spare mon­i­tors of any decent quality.

This screen is okay in terms of resolutions/refresh rate sup­port (it does 1024x768 at 85Hz, which is very good for a cheap ven­dor from the late 90s — and yes, it was cheap — this is a Celeron 400MHz sys­tem, though we’ve pumped up the RAM from prob­a­bly 64MB or (opti­misti­cally) 128MB to 256MB to make it usable with XP. It is, how­ever, rather blurry.

Or, was. We acquired it just as we moved into this house, so I didn’t really have a lot of time to spend just set­ting it up prop­erly… I was try­ing to get, you know, four other com­put­ers and the net­work setup, whilst work­ing out how to con­fig­ure the phone sys­tem… oh, yeah, and I had to move into my bed­room at some point, too (in actual fact I still haven’t unpacked all the boxes… there is one or two remain­ing but I know what’s in them and they’re being stored in the bot­tom of a wardrobe, so that’s okay!)… basi­cally I threw it on the desk and plugged it in, for­mat­ted and installed XP, made some triv­ial admin­is­tra­tive soft­ware changes (prob­a­bly via RDC because hot desk­ing is, like, so much eas­ier than turn­ing around and using another KVM setup!), and promptly for­got about it.

So today I actu­ally had to use it for a bit and its blur­ri­ness irri­tated me enough to bother doing some­thing about it. It’s got one of those doors that cov­ers con­trols and pops open to reveal a rotary switch that dou­bles as a but­ton, so I did that see­ing if there was any­thing I could do to fix it in there. Alas, no soft­ware focus util­i­ties to be found (must poke a screw­driver in the back of it some­time), though, impor­tantly, there are both Ver­ti­cal and Hor­i­zon­tal Moire adjust­ments avail­able under the More option from the core menu. This mon­i­tor had a fairly sig­nif­i­cant moire prob­lem (I’m not sure if I’m using that term cor­rectly, though I know the prob­lem was with that), so play­ing with these set­tings for a bit made its lots more pleas­ant to use.

Admit­tedly, its focus towards the edges drops off fairly sig­nif­i­cantly, but that could be an unavoid­able lim­i­ta­tion of the device (that is, it’s a curved CRT dis­play… so the focal length phys­i­cally does change fairly significantly).