-=> Quoting rod fewster to all <=-
 rf> I've read enough crap about viruses trashing monitors in the past few
 rf> weeks to last me for life!
I haven't read any of those.
 rf> Over the years plenty of people have claimed to have "a friend whose
 rf> wife's brother's mate's girlfriend got a virus which set fire to her
 rf> monitor", but no-one has ever provided a sample of such a virus, and
 rf> no antivirus researcher in the world has ever seen one!
 rf> MONITOR-DESTROYING VIRUSES DO NOT EXIST ... and crapping on ad nauseum
 rf> about how these figments of the imagination "would" or "could" work if
 rf> they _did_ exist won't change that!
I agree with you.  I don't see how that could technically work.
Now if a virus (or trojan for that matter) were to jam a printer,
low-level format a poorly designed IDE drive, or make a motherboard
or video card unusable by trashing EEPROMs on board that have them,
I could believe that, but a monitor...different story.  Now, many
monitor utilities will tell you not to run the monitor out of sync
that it may damage the monitor, and that I guess could overwork the
flyback transformer and either take it or the horizontal output
transistor out, and it wouldn't be hard for a virus to get a
monitor out of sync...plenty of DOS programs do that.  But, I can't
picture doing that making a monitor explode or catch on fire under
normal circumstances.  I've seen interlaced monitors when someone
send a non-interlaced signal to it, and although I've heard the
monitors like that make some strange noises, I've never seen one
catch on fire, or become damaged.  Of course, it is always a smart
idea to turn the machine off if the monitor losed sync, although I
imagine it would take hours or days of this to cause any noticable
damage.  If this did cause any damage, I would think the most likely
symptom would be a dead set, since the flyback and the yoke coil
form a tuned circuit and if the flyback opens up or develops a
short, the tuned circuit is upset and proper oscillations cannot
occur, so no high voltage will come from the flyback.  Without
the high voltage, there will be no sync pulses reaching the yoke,
nor any plate voltages on the CRT.  But, in my opinion, it would be
rare for any program to damage a monitor (except for the phosphors
if an image stayed on the screen, or if the video card was programmed
to drop one of the sync pules, causing a line to get burned into
the screen).  It would be more likely that a monitor would go on its
own without the help of such a program.  A local electronics dealer
said he repaired a few monitors and in about all the ones he worked
on, the flyback or the horizontal output was bad.
 
 rf> If you can write such a virus, DO IT ... and make yourself famous!
 rf> If you can't ... SHUT UP ABOUT IT!
Good point.
 
--- GEcho 1.11+
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