Out of Pod Experience

So, I know this is a long shot.. but I'm looking for solutions.

Literally just today, my Dell 20 inch SP2008WFP monitor began to have little horizontal flickering lines creep around the screen. It was subtle at first, and only seemed to come from certain colors. After a few hours of trying to figure out what program was causing it, I finally turned off the monitor.

When I turned it back on, the entire screen was FILLED (almost every row of pixels, stretching from left to right) with flickering blurring horizontal lines. The screen is largely unusable now, as even text is distorted so badly it becomes a headache to read.

I've heard lots of reasons for this, but one of the prevailing ones is that it is some sort of bad contact. From how I understand it, there is a 'thing' that connects the circuitry to the panel, and it's held on by pressure instead of soldering or rivets or what have you.

Is this something an intermediate custom computer enthusiast can fix? I have little to no experience with electrical engineering or clean-room repair. Is this something I would be able to comprehend and repair or rig with simple tools? Would I need replacement parts?

Otherwise, since this monitor is long since out of warranty (4+ years old, third party vendor), where can I take it for repair? Can I trade it in for a discount on a new monitor? How can I minimize the costs of getting a working monitor of comparable quality on my desktop again?

Monitors suffer capacator problems worse than anything else I have ever seen - I have a syncmaster i resurrected when a friend got rid of it for being dead.
First check that no internal ribbons have come loose or whatever, but this is unlikely unless you throw the monitor around the place a lot.

Dismantling an LCD screen is safe enough as long as you have it unplugged, the inverters shift a lot of voltage but they don't hold any current when powered off so it's fine.

Check the boards for: Bulging capacators, the cheap electrolitic caps are often really crap, you can get semi-decent ones pretty cheap from Maplin or many MANY places online (£0.25 each for mine). Even if they LOOK okay they can still be faulty, look carefully at which way round they are soldered to the board, (the white stripe indicates polarity), and desolder them, and test them with an ohmmeter - you should get an initial high resistance that swiftly drops to nill. If you get a persistant resistance, it might be faulty (and it never hurts to replace them with better quality ones in ANY case) - Just make sure the REPLACEMENTS are exactly the same rating as the old ones - you CAN get away with putting in different sized ones but it starts getting complicated and may cause more problems so keep it simple and go like for like.

Also check the bead caps that litter the board. (they look like small blue or orange smarties with legs) You can test those in situ, with an ohmmeter, and should show a similar response as the bigger electrolytic caps. Most basic digital multimeters will do this no problems. Those show no visible signs of damage, but can fail just as easily as the electrolytic caps. Again, replace like for like if they are faulty.

Most of the other parts will be either too small to check, or will need an oscilloscope to test. Furthermore, on all componants you can, briefly melt the solder of each on the bottom of the board (but do not REMOVE any of it ffs!), as a cold solder joint can cause havoc too.

Be careful, take care and time, and it should be fine.

All else fails, replacement boards for most monitors show up on ebay quite a lot, for varying prices. People who crack the screens usually flog the parts (if they are smart, dumb people bin the things).

Good luck!

It creeps in over time, my old Samsung 226 (Samsung is well known for it) started its death rattle some 6-8 months before it finally gave in and died.