"boardjunkie" wrote ...
My point was that the unit was completely useless and shouldn't have
been there to begin with. What....now I should haul in test equipment,
soldering station and wire, and power supplies to test stuff?

Or do you want THEM to do that? Are you prepared to pay
the price they will want for "tested-good" vs. "as-is"?

I think your expectations were competely unreasonable.
Do you really think SA, or GW or any of those charities
can afford to hire people who know a power prick from
a toaster?

Sure...I'll just set up a test bench on some furniture and soak in the
puzzled looks. I don't mind repairing the stuff I get from thrift
shops, so long as its possible.

If it were me, I would have gone home and grabbed a PS
to use to test it with.

If I wanted to just make a donation, I would have. The monitor was
damaged, unrepairable, and just plain should have been trashed. Just
for kicks I'm gonna go there tomorrow to see if its back on the shelf
for sale.

But if YOU didn't know whether it was damaged until you
plugged it into a 12V PS, how on earth do you expect THEM
to know that? This is the very definition of a "pig in a poke".

I love scrounging for hidden treasures at GW, et.al., but
when you buy stuff like that, untested, you gotta allow for
a certain percentage of dissapointments. If you aren't willing
to take the gamble, don't buy it.