Old Monitor, New PC

There’s nothing worse than losing a great piece of equipment because you can’t find the necessary updates to keep it going. One of our readers is facing that situation. “You finally put the reasons for not going online with XP into terms I could understand. Using just the 8 online now. Thanks. Waiting to upgrade the XP though. Waiting to see if they’ll upgrade the drivers on my older printer and scanner to 8. Only 7 for those so far but that may change. Can monitors be upgraded internally? No driver updates for my great 2005 Sony monitor past VISTA! I LOVE that monitor! More than the new HP HD monitor. Truer color I think. Noticed that some bigger newer monitors are VERY expensive too. Need to be able to use my printer and scanner sometimes. “

Most monitors can’t be updated internally because they don’t have any software on board to update.  If you’re using a smart TV as a monitor, then they will periodically go online and check for updates.  But, on the other hand, have you simply tried hooking your monitor up to your new PC?  I know a lot of people (some of them professional photographers) who prefer using old CRT monitors over LED or LCD for just the reason that you’ve mentioned… truer color tone.  I will say that the last time that I heard that complaint was about five years ago, though, so the LED’s and LCD’s may have gotten better on color tone.  I know that they have on contrast.  But unless your monitor has A LOT of special features built into it, there should be no reason to have to update the software for it (which would happen in your device manager, more than likely).

The one potential problem that I foresee is that those old CRT monitors, for the most part, connected through a 15 pin VGA port, which a lot of modern computers don’t support.  One way to fix this, if you’re facing this problem is to get an adapter that will allow you to connect your VGA monitor to either a DVI or HDMI port.  I would recommend HDMI if your computer supports it, simply because of the fact that HDMI is rapidly becoming the industry standard.

~ Randal