My Screen Just Crashed…

It used to be the case that mice, keyboards and screens were just hardware - "mechanical" bolt-ons to your computer, which had the actual digital brains. Recently, I had to get a new screen. It is now complex enough to crash - and need a reboot!

Screen power cycle.

Nice.

I like simple tools, that are more binary in nature - they either work or they don't. Like a hammer. Either you can whack stuff with it, or you can't. None of this "Wait a while…", "Power cycle and pray…", "Try again…" business. The downside of intelligence is that there are orders of magnitude many more reasons for them to stop working. And I'm only counting the ones with nebulous indications of failure - "Blue Screen Of Death" style failures.

These days, screens, keyboards, mice and headsets are as likely to fail inexplicably as the "computer", be it desktop, laptop, tablet or phone, itself.