The Dell P1110 Journey
February 8th, 2021
On the weekend before February 8th, 2021, I had noticed an old CRT television in my neighbor's driveway while getting a ride to my dad's house. The only reason I had noticed this was by spotting what seemed to look like the butt of a CRT, so I wasn't even sure if it was one, but wrote it down for when I came back anyways.
Eventually, February 8th came, and after a blizzard hit the area and my online classes were over for the day, I decided to head on over and ask my neighbor if I could take the TV.
After ringing the doorbell, a woman opened the door and I asked if I could grab the old television in her driveway. I was given the green light as she said "of course, everything there is free to go". I thanked her, and walked over to the snow and ice-ridden driveway to obtain my lucky find.
As I was picking up the TV, however, I had spotted a giant white block to my left that was coated entirely in snow, sinking into the mud, and encased in a lot of ice as water was still dripping onto it from the roof of the house. Upon noticing this, I immediately placed down the TV and walked over (in anticipation) to whatever this thing I had just spotted was. The first thing I was able to identify were the 2 VGA ports on the bottom of the unit, which immediately told me that this wasn't just a PC CRT monitor, but a high end one.
I then started doing whatever I could to remove the ice and snow from the back of the monitor in order to identify what I had stumbled upon; and once I had succeeded, I was able to make out "Dell UltraScan P1110". Whipped out my phone, googled the model, found the (rip) CNET page, and got all the information I was looking for.
Upon reading that this was a 21", 121khz PC monitor I collectively lost my shit in the middle of my neighbor's driveway and yelled "no fucking way" and ignored the TV for the time being as I picked up and carried the 75lb (34kg) beast down the street and to my house.
Unfortunately, quarantine had weakened the living hell out of my muscle mass and carrying this thing just down my street was a nightmare to say the least. I took a couple of breaks and even took a photo because I couldn't contain my excitement.
As I got to my house, my legs were trembling and were on the brink of
collapsing as I brought the monitor up only 5 steps of stairs to the deck. I
left the P1110 on the deck and ran into the kitchen to wash my hands with
steaming hot water since I could've sworn I was on the brink of frostbite
from holding this thing.
When I got back downstairs, my sister and her boyfriend were coming up the street and I yelled "I'M SO FUCKING LUCKY" several times to them. Of course, they had no god damn idea what I was talking about.
After a good while, I was able to get the P1110 up the spiral staircase and into the house. I also went back and got the old CRT TV and placed both of them on towels for obvious reasons.
Some Disassembly Required
Once I was ready, I grabbed my screwdriver kit as well as some other things to take the monitor apart so I could separate all of the boards and parts of the case to dry and clean.
I discharged the monitor (not that I probably needed to, but better
safe than in a lot of pain) and began to take a shitload of pictures of
the insides at tons of angles. I can't even begin to make clear how
important it is to take pictures of stuff you're taking apart; it will
save your ass.
The next couple images show the before and after of the P1110's case, as well as tube. For the case I sprayed some parts with a hose and manually cleaned the rest of it with Windex and paper towels. The CRT screen was simply cleaned with disinfectant wipes.
Before:
After:
Before:
After:
Moment of Truth
February 10th, 2021
The time had come for me to plug her in and see if my efforts had paid off. I was understandably fucking horrified as I literally could not predict what will happen once I push the power button in.
Not sure why I built tension by typing that; this blog clearly exists for a reason. Anyways, SHE TURNED ON AND LOOKED GOOD AS HELL.
It was unlike any CRT I had ever seen. The colors were so deep, the sharpness was hypnotizing, and I was so damn proud. However, I had noticed that while it was on, I heard a *spark* sound. Looked into it and discovered what arcing was. I cleaned the boards as that could've been the culprit, and it seemed to not have happened anymore once I did that so I assumed it was safe to put her fully back together and use my brand new Dell P1110.
Blurred Lines: A Living Hell
February 16, 2021
Oh yeah. It's time for the meat and potatoes. It was on this day that I had noticed my P1110 would randomly go blurry out of nowhere. This was concerning, but I found out that simply turning off and o the monitor would fix it for a bit. I stuck with doing that for a bit, hoping that it would go away with time.
As the days went by, the blurring just seemed to occur more often at greater intensities, as well as being accompanied with arcing. So I decided to take a trip to the hardware store, grab some contact cleaner and some dielectric grease, and went to work.
I started by spraying down all of the boards that I had access to while the back of the monitor was off. I also sprayed the flyback focus pots in hopes that they could also be the source of the blurring.
After that, I cleaned both the anode cap and around the hole with some alcohol. Then iced the anode cap and its hole with dielectric grease like a cake.
Once I had finished, I turned the monitor back on and waited for a while to see if the issue persisted. After about an hour of constantly being on, it seemed like she was good to go, so I brought her back to my desk.
February 26th, 2021
Surprise surprise, she became blurry once more. I was annoyed, but just pressed on. Something nice did happen though; my Spyder2 colorimeter came in, so that night I learned how to color calibrate and made my P1110 look even better than she already did using HCFR.
Well, she wasn't getting much better. Pretty much every day she would blur more than once. From the time between February 26th to March 1st, I had learned how to use WinDAS and adjusted the G2, so I was now able to do adjustments through that piece of shit software, which would prove useful for uh, forever, I guess.
March 2nd, 2021
The day where all hell began to break loose. In the middle of an online class, my P1110 became blurry VERY fast, and then arced in such a way that sounded like a capacitor fucking blew. (To be clear, a capacitor did NOT blow, but it really did sound like it.) When that sound happened, the entire screen became a horrific blurry mess and a portion of the screen became red, which lasted for as long as it took for me to slam my finger into the power button which was 2 seconds at most.
I made a rendition (while it looks sloppy, it is actually pretty damn accurate as to what I saw) of how fucked up the screen became. I was on a Google Doc, just to clarify what's being displayed. And conveniently, because I had NVIDIA ShadowPlay instant replay enabled, I was able to get the sound the monitor made from my microphone picking it up.
This was my breaking point. As soon as online classes were over, I immediately took the P1110 off of my desk for what felt like the 1,000th time and took it apart. I spent the next several hours scrubbing every single board in the monitor with alcohol and a toothbrush. During that process, I had also checked every board for a component that looked suspicious as well as cold/broken solder joints or traces.
She turned on still, which was nice after seeing her completely gutted just moments before testing. Same thing as before: waited for a while to see if the problem persisted, then back on my desk she went.
It's Bath Time
March 3rd, 2021
Blurry as ever. What other options do I have at this point? Maybe she's just dirty somewhere that I'm not aware of.
Another hardware store trip later and I've got myself some Simple Green to use in my shower in order to drown all of the insides of my P1110 to effectively eliminate any variable whatsoever that dust or some sort of filth that somehow remains after all of this time is the reason for this nightmare I've been going through.
And so, I completely took the monitor apart, shields and everything. Almost as bare bones as it could get. Then, I went into the bathroom, placed them in the tub and drowned them with both water and Simple Green.
After I had sprayed the boards down with water for a good while after soaking in Simple Green, I took them out to dry by placing them on some towels and having a fan blow at them.
I knew that if this didn't fix it, then cleaning will no longer be something to resort to. Because the boards weren't absolutely soaked when I had put them out to dry, I decided to wait one day to put the monitor back together and see if bath time was the solution to all of these problems. I also, of course, when reassembling the monitor, reapplied the dielectric grease once more.
March 4th, 2021
Good news. The P1110 still worked. The bad news? It's still fucking going blurry. So, I decided to see what would happen if I adjusted the focus pots on the flyback while the blur was happening out of curiosity. For one moment it fixed it, but it kept drifting a ton.
That's an image of a YouTube video being displayed.
So clearly, the issue is now at its worst. Turning off and on the monitor, even for prolonged periods, isn't fixing it. Hell, even if it did, who would want to daily drive a monitor with an issue like that?
In my mind, the flyback was on its way out. What else could it be, really? I've cleaned everything, checked all traces and components, and redid the dielectric grease. While I was sitting there thinking about what to do, I realized something. The neckboard had some interesting looking solder joints, and the blurring, now at its worst, was happening in a painfully hot room. So, desperate for any solution of any kind, I thought to myself: "perhaps a solder joint is ever so slightly fucked up on the neckboard and because of excessive heat, it messes everything up". It makes sense considering the neckboard shield is heavily dented, which could've implied the monitor was dropped so badly that it damaged a joint on the board.
So, I decided that I would reflow the joints on the neckboard; my final option.
Judgment Day
March 6th, 2021
I had resoldered the neckboard a couple times until I was satisfied, since 
After everything seemed to check out and look good, I gave her some power, hoped for the best, and pressed the button. Everything looked good, but then, all of a sudden, the screen started flashing giant chunks of red green and blue as well as blurring, so I turned it off. Thinking I had just for some reason screwed up my solder job, I redid it and turned it on again.
This time, it was way, way worse. Red and green rarely flashed in for brief milliseconds and blue was the only color consistently displaying. To even get a visible picture, I would have to go on something that was very bright, which would just give me the dimmest picture imaginable. It was unusable. Yes, that image is also the monitor trying to display a YouTube video.
And so, I resoldered the neckboard over and over to try and see if I could get it to work. No matter how many times I tried, each varying the amount of solder on each pin of the tube socket, nothing seemed to work. To this day, I'm honestly still not sure why this had even happened. My best guess is since its high voltage, its finicky when it comes to soldering. I genuinely have no idea, as I was soldering correctly.
Death and Despair
March 7th, 2021
On this day, I considered my P1110 to be done for. I tried everything I could to bring her back into shape and working for me to use for years on end. Although the journey had come to an end, I was still hopeful. Hopeful that one day, whether it be a month, a year, or several years, I will one day find a donor monitor and bring my P1110 back to life. Whenever that would be, I really didn't care.
At the very least, I was able to learn a lot about working on CRTs just from my P1110 alone. I discharged a tube for the first time, learned how to color calibrate, apply dielectric grease, and clean boards properly. So, that was something that I could take from this. Regardless, I placed the P1110 in the living room as a daily reminder of what I will strive to one day bring back from the dead.
Glimmer of Hope
March 25th, 2021
While I was walking around town with my friend Caden looking for tubes, (which we managed to find, were just a couple of old TVs, nothing special) I got a message from a friend in the community,
showing a Facebook Marketplace listing of several CRTs for $35 in a storage unit just a state away from me. Looking through the pictures of what could be seen, we spotted what looked to be an IBM P260, which is a variant of the Sony CPD-G500, which the Dell P1110 is a variant of.
Yeah, this was what I was fucking waiting for. And I only had to wait ~2 weeks for the opportunity to present itself. I talked with the seller for a good while; I had to take as many monitors as possible, which I was more than happy to oblige. Not that my mom was, but that's besides the point; I've got a patient that needs saving.
Day of Fate
March 28th, 2021
The day had come just a couple of weeks after my P1110 was declared dead. And so, the multiple hour trip was made to retrieve several monitors. After waiting a good bit for the seller to show up while my father and I were in the car as it rained, the time had finally come. We loaded a lot of monitors into the car, and while doing so I managed to spot a second IBM P260, and made sure as hell to grab it.
So, for what's relevant to this story in terms of the haul, I managed to get my hands on not one, but two IBM P260s.
Can you guess what happened next? Do I need to even continue typing? Unfortunately, yeah. So, I got to work as soon as I could with a P260 and my P1110 on the same table, and took both apart. As expected, the insides of the P260 were identical to my P1110's. But, unexpectedly, the insides of the P260 I was taking apart were clean. VERY CLEAN. The neckboard was a borderline mirror with how clean it was.
It took quite a bit and was a pain to keep track of what was what, but I was able to transplant the neckboard from the P260 into the P1110 successfully. Then, after a reassembly, I powered on the P1110 and prayed to the tube gods that I'll be fuckin' spared for once.
Yup. She was back. A coma awakening like no other, seeing the Firefox menu slowly illuminate right before my eyes was fucking magical. Finally, FINALLY the journey had come to a victorious end and I could finally enjoy using my Dell P1110 for as long as I could possibly imagine.
Post Tubematic Stress Disorder
March 28th, 2021
After using my P1110 for just a little bit, it did what you think it did. But hey, it's alright, that must mean it really was just the flyback all along. After a flyback board swap, (why resolder the whole thing when you can just unplug the board and switch it out?) I did the same routine of waiting and declared her "good to go back on the desk" and called it a night.
Quick interjection; you might be wondering why I didn't decide to just use the IBM P260 instead of my Dell P1110. There are several reasons for this. One was the fact that the case the P1110 uses looks very sleek, in my opinion, compared to the P260. Second, both P260s, while being pristine on the inside, were not so similar on the outside. Both cases had damage and were very filthy. Third, the P1110's case at this point was sentimental to me and just ditching it for the P260s would not sit right with me. It might sound crazy, but trust me, after working with something like this for so long and living with the desire to see it working properly on your desk, it really grows on you.
March 29th, 2021
Uh, so it became blurry again. That's uh, funny. No joke, when it started going blurry again here, I started laughing like a fucking maniac. So uh, it must be the power supply then, right? I mean, christ, is the inside of the case haunted by a fucking ghost or something? So I swapped the power supply as well from one of the P260s.
March 30th, 2021
Tried that for a day. Did not fix it. But hey, why not try the OTHER power supply? Might as well eliminate every single fucking variable possible, yeah? Well, while doing so, I noticed that the assembly and components used on this one PSU were different compared to the other two PSUs from the other P260 and the P1110.
To explain whatever the fuck I just said, in other words, out of the three PSUs, only one was different. So I decided to try the "different" power supply, which I later nicknamed the "gold cap" PSU in reference to its distinct golden looking capacitor.
Flying Back to Hell
April 1st, 2021
Everything seemed to have been going well so far throughout the day. Well, besides one arc, but I decided to just, well, ignore it and continue on. During the afternoon, I had my friend Caden come over so I could show him CS:GO running on my P1110 at 1440x1080p@100hz now that the monitor was up and running. We were enjoying it until, well, something fatal happened.
The flyback said adios. I shit you not. While I was walking around in Nuke on CS:GO, the screen all of a sudden turned off like I pressed the power button, went black, and a grinding screech presented itself in the back of the monitor.
I pressed the power button to stop the noise, and just sat there, staring into the now unlit phosphors of my monitor. I looked at Caden and said "the flyback just fucking died". Losing such a vital component sucks ass, but at least I had two flybacks left. This might be the worst April Fools' day prank that has ever been played on me.
Ship of Theseus
April 6th, 2021
I took a small break to get ready for whatever the hell was going to come next. Once I had swapped the flyback board once again with my P1110, I began to use it at my desk for a while, and then it arced. I turned off the monitor because I made the realization that perhaps the arc I got a little bit before the other flyback died was a warning. This only seemed to be happening ever since I put the golden cap PSU into my P1110. So, I believe that specific PSU has something wrong with it. Sure, I definitely could be wrong and it was just a major coincidence, but do you really think I'm gonna risk that? Luckily, it's easy to distinguish it from the others because of its golden capacitor.
The arcing never happened again and the flyback never died after I swapped the PSU, so I'm happy with that. What I'm not happy with, however, is the fact that the BLURRING IS STILL HERE. At this point, I had enough and swapped to one of the P260s. I had to remove the anti-glare sheet from the tube since it was FUBAR. Trust me, I can bare with stuff, this was actually impossible. The sheet was fucking destroyed. To ensure that I didn't have two flybacks with blurring issues, since the one that died never blurred, I put the flyback board originally from my P1110 into the P260. And with that, the P260 went onto my desk. The plan was to use it for an extended period of time to see if any issues would arise. I never beat the 3 day record of the monitor becoming blurry from the very start of this journey and to this point.
April 7th, 2021
Well, one day passed, and guess what happened when I turned the monitor on in the morning? Believe it or not, it wasn't blur, nor was it arcing. No, it was something new and I was filled with dread upon seeing it. The tube, out of nowhere, became brown and dark, then turned off.
An incredibly discouraged me then took the P260 back off the desk, onto a table, and took it apart. I visually inspected for whatever the fuck could be causing this issue and took off the neckboard shield. When I lifted the shield off, I started laughing in both relief and confusion. Somehow, the neckboard was coming off the neck of the tube. I have absolutely no clue how this was even possible since I made sure to tighten it like always when putting it back together. But hey, regardless, problem solved. Pushed it back in, made sure it was tight, and the monitor went back on my desk.
And so, one day passed, then three, then a week. And at that point, I was confident that it wasn't going to blur, as I have now figured out what the culprit was this entire time.
1110 Years of Progress
June 1st, 2021
This day was the day that I finally decided to wrap up and complete this journey of mine. I spent seven hours straight, no breaks, doing what I did. Adding up and thinking about every single variable and all of what I have swapped, there is no doubt about it. The culprit this entire time was the tube itself. For some reason, which MUST be localized to the electron gun assembly, something is wrong and causes these issues. The sad part is that since its a vacuum tube, of course, I can't just take it apart and somehow fix whatever the issue is. No use crying over spilled milk.
me anyways).
I also swapped the "control board" (as I like to call it) from the same P260 into the P1110. Basically, it's the board that holds all the information for geometry adjustments, color adjustments, digital purity adjustments, and all of that. Basically, all the memory. I swapped it so I didn't have to deal with redoing all of the geometry and digital purity once I had swapped tubes.
Once everything was swapped, I had to address this pink and purple tint issue. It must've been a color drift issue thanks to Sony or whatever, but the blacks were pink and the entire screen had a horrible purple tint. The OSD's color controls were not nearly enough to address this, so it was WinDAS time. It took a good number of hours to do since I had to figure out why it kept resetting my colors after applying the changes in 
After I got the colors calibrated using my colorimeter, it was time to put the case back on, put it on my desk, and finally, FINALLY finish 
One Year Later
February 8th, 2022
To this day, she has never gotten blurry. I have had absolutely no issues ever since I swapped the tube. I'm very grateful for everyone's help that allowed me to get to this point I'm at with my P1110's state. I really can't emphasize it enough; without a lot of people, this would have never been possible. You know who you are.
I plan to use this monitor for as long as I possibly can. And with an extra tube and flyback, I'm sure it'll take a looooong time for me to run out of resources for my P1110. As for the P1110's original tube, what do I think happened to it? Well, I've actually got a pretty good idea. Believe it or not, the neighbor who I got the monitor from is actually my friend Shawn's uncle. So I mentioned to him one time how I realized he probably could've saw the monitor as a kid. Which he then told me that he actually probably did, since he visited there around elementary school (~2008) and saw a PC CRT monitor on his uncle's desk. Given these circumstances, and the fact that the monitor was manufactured in 1999, I've thought of this: unless he was given the monitor at a later date (which I doubt), his uncle used this monitor for at least 9-10 years.
Obviously, if the blurring issue was present at all during this time, he would still not be using it in 2008. Hell, I had access to tools and whatnot and couldn't use it without opening it up 3 days at a time. And then taking the massive dent into consideration with the neckboard shield, and the fact that the neck of the CRT is really the only internal spot that could be damaged when it comes to those focusing issues, I believe that at some point his uncle had dropped or did something with the P1110 that had caused it to dent the shield and internally damage the tube. I've tested and it takes A LOT of force to dent the shield at all, even with a hammer, so it must've been quite the incident. Hopefully my theory is correct; it's kind of all I've got to run off of.
If it wasn't obvious enough, this entire blog was created to commemorate the one year anniversary of me stumbling across this monitor. It has brought me on a wild ride that I never expected once I turned to my left that very day one year ago. Before I stop typing, below are a shit ton of images showing the monitor in action. Might as well show off what I worked so damn hard for, yeah? Anyways, if you read all of this, thank you. I really appreciate it. I spent so many hours typing all of this. I probably should've done it before the 8th, but I had to start and finish this on the same day. Gotta stay faithful to the date.
