well sorta... my grandmother-in-law gave me her RCA 32" LCD when it decided to not work after 2 or so years of her owning it... it was out of warranty so RCA would do nothing... we bought her a new much larger plasma to watch her ball games and westerns on...
I dropped it off at the local TV repair shop to have it looked at... based on my research online I had my suspicions but for $30 I figured it might be worth a look... they said the main board (board with the tunner and such on it) was dead... but RCA doesn't make extra parts and no one had them in stock... so he said it was basically trash... the main board is what I expected based on research and I knew I could find one used online...
so I ordered the board online and install it only to find out that it's doing the same thing :(
some more digging online and I found out that a stupid 3.2mm × 1.6 mm 200mA fuse on the bottom of the power board was likely to blame... so a few mm of wire to bridge the gap verified thats it... it works now... I might at some point buy a new fuse... but for now it works and sits nicely in the spare room... maybe at some point another xbox will be attached so I can shoot people in the spare room without being bothered lol...
anyway gota love GRMness... had it not been for megasquirt I'd prob never learned how to solder and this would just be another TV in the landfills...
They put a fuse there for a reason, right?
put a fuse holder and a 1.5 amp mini-fuse in it. 
Its kind of amazing what you can fix with a soldering gun, a multimeter and a bit of courage. I've started to cut failed modules apart to see what is causing the problem, and its almost always a bad solder joint, or a failed relay on the circuit board- and the relays are almost always out there somewhere, and usually under $10. Mouser Electronics is your friend.
yup.. if you are not afraid, you can fix most anything.
My neighbor and I messed with an old non-functioning guitar amp one night after a couple of beers. We didn't fix it, but we did make some cool sparks!
from some research the "fuse" is a resetable fuse... something along the lines of an automatic circuit beaker... sometimes it just doesn't reset...
right now i've got it hooked to the computer as a 2nd monitor... watching youtube on it while surfing... the 720p resolution sucks compared to the higher res 20" monitor next to it... but it's free :)
Nice! Had a Vizio plasma (LG board) from Costco that died almost right out of warranty, and this was a TV that was sold right after Costco changed their TV policy. AmEx refunded the entire cost of the TV since nobody locally worked on that brand. I tried replacing the blown fuse, no dice. Sold it on Craigs to some guy for $100 who was sure he could fix it.
Customer had a laptop which turned on but had no display, even when hooked up to an external monitor, used working motherboard was $80ish on ebay plus cost of labor... she didn't think it was worth fixing so I gave her $20 for it. Took it completely apart, tossed the motherboard into the oven and now I have a functioning laptop 
haha thats awesome on the oven...
this is the size of the fuse that died... and on the back side of the circuit board no less
Coolness! I picked up a nice Paradigm 10" Home theater sub for $15 at goodwill recently. It didn't work at first but one 7.5 amp glass fuse and its been thumping away for the past week or so.
^If you find another one of those, let me know. I LOVE me some Paradigm gear.
i have a 32" magnavox LCD in the bedroom. i saw it poking out of someone's trash can one night with no power cord and no remote. i grabbed it, tossed a computer cord on it, hit my philips remote from the big living room TV, and it turned on. has a small discolored spot at the very top where you don't even notice it, so i hung it on the wall in the bedroom. i just take the remote in the bedroom with me when i want to watch tv.
Sounds like you wasted $30 to find out the board may or may not have been shot. Why didn't the "repair" shop know to check the fuse? Kudos to you for spending a little bit of time to figure it out. That makes me wonder how much stuff gets tossed that could be repaired, and easily, if the "repairmen" did more than the quick, easy, costly replace parts rather than fix something.
minimac wrote:
Sounds like you wasted $30 to find out the board may or may not have been shot. Why didn't the "repair" shop know to check the fuse? Kudos to you for spending a little bit of time to figure it out. That makes me wonder how much stuff gets tossed that could be repaired, and easily, if the "repairmen" did more than the quick, easy, costly replace parts rather than fix something.
yes... yes I did waste $30 for a bit of comfort thinking the expert knew what he was doing...
next time I'll dig a bit deeper before letting another expert deal with something fairly trival...
