Tip: Dead Pixels Work as a Handy Guide
My 21 inch CRT monitor at work has a row of dead pixels about one quarter the way down from the top. It appears as a slightly dashed or dotted line of gray and is particularly visible when I have something with a white or light background up on the screen. Normally it is just an annoyance, but it served me well one day this week when Windows was acting up. I was implementing a design and wanted to test vertical alignment in my browser window versus my mockup, so I had the browser window on top of and to the side of my maximized Fireworks window and was attempting to take a screen shot to put into Photoshop and test alignment with a nice straight Photoshop guide.
As luck would have it, the ‘Print Screen’ function had decided to take a break from working as things in Windows will often do. I knew a simple reboot would restore ‘Print Screen’ as it had in the past but I had my test server spun up with 8 or 9 different browsers for testing my CSS. Sometimes rebooting is a major inconvenience.
Just as I was about to start closing windows, I noticed that familiar gray line of dead pixels hovering about 2-3 pixels above the two elements that I was testing for alignment. Sure enough, the distance between the two elements and the dead pixels was uniform so I knew I had it down to at least within one pixel or so which was good enough for the time being. So basically, I utilized a hardware deficiency in my monitor to overcome a software deficiency of my operating system in order to perform a simple task. I should note this on my performance review under “Problem Solving.”