: How does slapping an old tv make it work again?
In: Technology
There’s lots of potential answers here… but I’m skeptical of most of them – at least for the cases that were happening often. Like, I’ve seen TVs and xboxes that turn on after a hit, and I think those may have the kinds of faults described in other comments (a shakey connection that was restored by hitting or heating, solder issues, etc..).. but I don’t think that was what was happening with CRTs, at least not usually.
I think that rather than “restoring a bad connection”, I think hitting the TV was temporarily causing something to lose power or connection, and thus we were effectively partially-rebooting it by hitting it. An old TV didn’t have a ton of “state” to reset, but it had some, and I think hitting it probably disconnected something that was important – like the electronics that maintained syncing to the vertical blank in the signal, or something in that kind of vein. Once the connection came back (because the disruptive shock had passed) that sync got a fresh new chance to match up right.
That’s fitting with the kind of issues I saw with TVs anyway. You could normally get some sense of the correct picture still being there; it wasn’t like the TV was blank or it felt like something had actually fully lost power or connection. Rather, it seemed like something had gone out of alignment, and that we were fixing it with kind of a “reset”.
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