My Sony SDM-X82 LCD monitor is giving me troubles again (this is the 4th time). It has just passed the warranty. Well, even if it is still under warranty, I wouldn’t bother calling them. They just keep sending you refurbished units that are worse. In fact, the current one was a refurbished unit they sent when the old one died. It had problems when it first arrived. But now it’s becoming worse. Basically, the image would sometimes suddenly go off. I had to turn it off and one again. Sometimes I have to do this multiple times. This was exactly the same problem the 3 times before. They simply didn’t do anything to fix it!

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If you are like me who manages headless Windows boxes from remote desktop, you would sometimes find it necessary to shutdown or reboot the box. The shutdown button wouldn’t show up in the start menu, however. You can write a small program, or activate Task Manager by Ctrl+Alt+End and shutdown/reboot from there.