A couple of months ago I bought an HP monitor for my laptop. I spent $400 for the high-end HP 2711x, a 27 inch monitor with high-resolution. It worked fine for about a month.

Then it started behaving strangely. It pops up a menu, but the menu is inoperable. After a second or two it pops up the message “OSD Lockout” in the middle of the screen. The two things cycle back and forth. It keeps doing that forever, until you turn it off.

The online forums are full of this item. Everybody with HP monitors seems to have this problem. It renders the monitor useless. The forums say to press the menu button for 10 seconds to enable/disable the OSD capability (whatever that is). It also says to press the power button for 30 seconds to reset the monitor to factory settings.

However, my buttons on my monitor do nothing, no matter how long I press any of them. The manual does not deal with this scenario. Nothing makes sense. I have to turn off the unit by pulling the power cable, then I have to press the menu button while I plug it back in and keep holding the button through the power-up procedure. Don’t ask how I figured that out, but it seems to hold off the OSD Lockout condition for a day or so, until it happens again.

So I decided to contact HP support.

First it asked me to enter my serial number and product number. I turned off the unit, dismounted it from the stand, turned it upside down and wrote down the two numbers off the tag. I reassembled it all, went back to the site, and typed in the numbers. It told me that they are not valid, yet I know they are. I just wrote  them down. As an alternative, it gives me an option to “detect” it.  I figured that can’t hurt.

Before it can “detect” it, it needs to install a detection software Active X. Ok. I go through all that. Now I run it again.

This screen has been sitting there now for the last half hour:

See the progress bar (red arrow). It’s not moving. How long would you wait? Forever?

1. It can’t recognize my serial number when I type it.
2. It can’t detect it when it searches for it.
3. It does not let me even send an email to a support tech until I have a valid serial number.
4. The manual describes a process that does not work.
5. The online help tools are just as useless as the “detection” tool above.

I am stuck in a terrible loop. HP apparently just wants me to give up, take the monitor back to Staples and tell them it does not work. Maybe that’s cheaper?

What do you think the chances are that I’ll buy another HP monitor after this?