I think I just experienced the "Mandela Effect"! ;-)

[MildredHubble]

So, not that I believe in such things, (although it's fun to hear stories about it!) I think I just slipped into a parallel dimension

TLDR: I'm just expressing my amazement that my old laptop screen fixed itself when it had been physically damaged and can't figure out how it somehow healed itself! Something spooky is going on!

For those who don't know the "Mandela Effect" is a phenomenon where people remember things being one way but reality doesn't agree. It gets it's name from people "remembering" that Nelson Mandela died in the mid 80s when of course he didn't. Other examples include people remembering product brand names being spelled differently or company logos looking different.

So anyway...to my experience today... About 7-8 years ago I bought a brand new laptop and I got about 3 years use out of it until somehow the screen got physically damaged. There was a penny sized area of physical damage to the screen where it would show a black void and around it, all kinds of messed up pixels and colours that made about 15% of the screen useless.

It was so bad that I gave up and bought a used MacBook Pro to replace it. I tried to use the old laptop for various things but the damaged screen made even simple stuff challenging. So it ended up being stored in a cupboard for 2 years. And for 3 years before that, the damage to the screen persisted.

So today I bought some RAM while we were out in York. I had planned to use the machine as a server under Linux so I wouldn't need to use a screen and could SSH connect to the machine via my Macs.

After searching high and low for it's power supply I decided just to install the RAM memory and put it aside until tomorrow. Then I remembered where I last saw the power supply. So I plugged it in and switched it on and was greeted with the BIOS setup screen. I set it to boot from the hard disk which definitely had Windows 10 installed last time it powered up. But somehow the drive is now blank!? Then I realised! The screen was, quite literally PERFECT! Not a hint of a problem, not even a dead pixel!!?

How did that happen?!!! I've never seen a damaged LCD screen fix itself. It's like nothing ever happened! Soooo spooky! And where did windows go?! The drive is just stubbornly blank!!?

Anyone got any ideas? Or did I just slip into a parallel universe?!

I'm extremely pleased that it seems I've got a pristine laptop that I can now use for lots of things! Such a nice bit of luck!

 

[MNAus]

Good news!!!. It may have been a stubborn pressure mark. Perhaps you were carrying it around in a bag that pushed on the same area of the lid all the time. These usually fix themselves pretty quickly, or never return to normal, but I guess it's possible it just needed time and cycles of temperature to have the crystals even out.

 

[Judge]

Good news!!!. It may have been a stubborn pressure mark. Perhaps you were carrying it around in a bag that pushed on the same area of the lid all the time. These usually fix themselves pretty quickly, or never return to normal, but I guess it's possible it just needed time and cycles of temperature to have the crystals even out.

Yep. The possibility that it all boiled down to a case of thermodynamics.

 

[SusanLR]

And where did the windows go?

 

[Outdated]

And where did the windows go?

Doesn't matter, he wants to use it as a headless server and only a fool would trust Microsoft for that.

 

[Crossbreed]

Anyone got any ideas?

A mouse...?
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-67902966

 

[Misty Avich]

The Mandela effect stresses me at times, because I have such a good autobiographical memory I worry in case my brain only made up half the thousands of memories I have.

I remember I had a videotape of an old TV drama I watched as a kid, and in it one of the characters said quite a memorable line. I could remember his facial expressions and everything as he said it. But when I watched it again a couple of years ago - on the exact same videotape I found in the attic (so it couldn't have been dubbed over or anything) - the line from the boy was worded completely differently to what I remember. It felt weird, because I could almost hear him saying what I thought I remember him saying clear as a bell in my head.

It's very strange.

 

[MildredHubble]

The Mandela effect stresses me at times, because I have such a good autobiographical memory I worry in case my brain only made up half the thousands of memories I have.

I remember I had a videotape of an old TV drama I watched as a kid, and in it one of the characters said quite a memorable line. I could remember his facial expressions and everything as he said it. But when I watched it again a couple of years ago - on the exact same videotape I found in the attic (so it couldn't have been dubbed over or anything) - the line from the boy was worded completely differently to what I remember. It felt weird, because I could almost hear him saying what I thought I remember him saying clear as a bell in my head.

It's very strange.

I tend to have very good Autobiographical Memory too. I get a bit worried that something is going wrong in my brain when objectively something doesn't agree with what I remember. I guess it just goes to show that anyone's memory can be faulty. I have been experiencing quite a lot of short term memory lapses though and that worries me a little as it's been quite bad these last few years.

I've had more than a few people try to pretend things happened differently to the way they did in reality. I suspect they just assume that they wouldn't remember so I won't and they try to pretend something else happened. Still it's a very useful ability as I tend to be able to recall where I put things (sometimes with a bit of effort) years after I put them away, for example the power supply for this laptop

I did think I was going a bit mad as when I first turned on the laptop I expected the damage to be in the top left and began to think "oh it must have been on the right and I'm remembering wrong" so I scanned the entire screen and when I saw there was no damage anywhere I felt really puzzled lol!

Good news!!!. It may have been a stubborn pressure mark. Perhaps you were carrying it around in a bag that pushed on the same area of the lid all the time. These usually fix themselves pretty quickly, or never return to normal, but I guess it's possible it just needed time and cycles of temperature to have the crystals even out.

It is pretty awesome it fixed itself! But I can't explain it. When the damage first appeared several years ago all I had done was plug in the charger and put it on a bedside table. Next morning I opened it up and it had a huge black spot with loads of fringing round it.

I tried to keep using it for about a year but it was right where the menu bar was in SketchUp etc. So I looked up the cost of a replacement screen and it was only £20 less than a used MacBook and since I had installed MacOS on my laptop I thought I'd get the real thing with it's sturdy aluminium construction.

The damage was still there about a year ago when I last used it as a VPN access point to figure out if our internet provider was throttling out internet, which they were. After we switched providers I just put the laptop in a mostly empty cupboard until I decided to make use of it last night. I was literally planning on removing the screen so it could essentially be a keyboard computer and use it as a server. I think I should probably use it for something more exciting now the screen works!

Yep. The possibility that it all boiled down to a case of thermodynamics.

Maybe keeping it powered off allowed it to remain cool for so long that the damaged screen reverted back to it's original state and it was powering it up that kept it, well, damaged?

And where did the windows go?

That will always be a mystery, but not one that particularly troubles me as windows is yucky. Still, I can't understand how Windows deleted itself. I suppose it makes it slightly easier to install a better OS

Doesn't matter, he wants to use it as a headless server and only a fool would trust Microsoft for that.

That's very true, though occasionally I've been foolish enough to do exactly that. It was very unreliable

A mouse...?
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-67902966

Lol! I've seen that video and it's so cute and funny! Maybe it was a little mouse? Or an Elf?

 

[Tom]

From a old/retired electronics technician point of view I would say there is a good chance of it just being glitch of some sort. The more complicated a machine gets the more odd little things can happen. We ended up using 'Can not duplicate' as the corrective action block entry more times then I could count. Sometimes called Gremlins.

 

[MildredHubble]

From a old/retired electronics technician point of view I would say there is a good chance of it just being glitch of some sort. The more complicated a machine gets the more odd little things can happen. We ended up using 'Can not duplicate' as the corrective action block entry more times then I could count. Sometimes called Gremlins.

I doubt I could replicate the sequence of events. Years ago my dad had a laptop where one of the little screws from the screen casing fell out and it got trapped between the keyboard and LCD when it was shut and it had basically exactly the same issue, a big round "hole" in the display. It never resolved itself though.

I thought maybe the same thing had happened but there were no missing screws. The thing that I find mind bending is that there's literally no evidence that it was ever damaged. It definitely wasn't a software issue because I erased the hard disk and installed Windows and the damage was still there.

If it weren't for the fact that it still has my Sonic the Hedgehog decal on the back of the screen I would be tempted to think someone had switched it for another or I'd somehow picked up someone else's laptop by mistake

 

[Judge]

I doubt I could replicate the sequence of events. Years ago my dad had a laptop where one of the little screws from the screen casing fell out and it got trapped between the keyboard and LCD when it was shut and it had basically exactly the same issue, a big round "hole" in the display. It never resolved itself though.

I thought maybe the same thing had happened but there were no missing screws. The thing that I find mind bending is that there's literally no evidence that it was ever damaged. It definitely wasn't a software issue because I erased the hard disk and installed Windows and the damage was still there.

If it weren't for the fact that it still has my Sonic the Hedgehog decal on the back of the screen I would be tempted to think someone had switched it for another or I'd somehow picked up someone else's laptop by mistake

Ever see a clever film called "Medicine Man" ?

Sean Connery as a brilliant scientist working in the Amazon looking for a cure for cancer. He finds it, and then loses it. With the rest of the film dealing with how he finds it again. I suspect you can relate.

 

[MildredHubble]

Ever see a clever film called "Medicine Man" ?

Sean Connery as a brilliant scientist working in the Amazon looking for a cure for cancer. He finds it, and then loses it. With the rest of the film dealing with how he finds it again. I suspect you can relate.

Oooo! I haven't seen it but it sounds very interesting so I know what I will watch tonight if I can't sleep (as usually happens) not because I think it will put me to sleep, but because it looks fun to watch

And I think thermals are definitely influencing the screen. It was fine so I decided to install windows so I could use the FPGA tools and I'm going to install chrome OS too. Eventually I will install Linux as I just found out that the FPGA tools work natively with Linux.

Then I noticed the screen was misbehaving again, but right at the edge, a good couple of inches away from where it had been damaged...

But it was still orders of magnitude more tolerable than before so I just decided to live with it.

Then after a couple of hours...

It's healing itself again!

So I definitely didn't just imagine it had been having issues before. So I'm thinking perhaps some moisture got in there somehow and it wasn't impact damage. Either way I'm really pleased I basically just got a usable laptop for basically free!

 

[Crossbreed]

Further, a bad capacitor can be extra sensitive to temperature changes...

 

[Aspychata]

I think it needs an aspirin. Or two.

 

[MildredHubble]

I think it needs an aspirin. Or two.

I could put a couple of aspirin in the CD drive and see if it perks up

I guess it might just need a bit of gentle encouragement, it's probably a bit confused after being left unloved for so long