Kernel Panic on RCA Television

[Fred McKenzie]

I had an RCA L32WD12 LCD HD Television set that would occasionally
exhibit a problem that looked like a kernel panic on a Unix computer.

When viewing channel D3-1 (Tampa) and pressing the "Info" button on the
remote, the information window would first appear but the screen would
immediately be flooded with white text. At that point, you could still
see the picture being updated behind the clutter, and hear the sound.
However nothing else would work. You couldn't change channels or turn
off the power.

The only escape was to unplug the set. Plugging back in after a few
seconds, the set would come back up in the "on" state. After the usual
initialization, it would be tuned to Channel D10-1 (also Tampa), but the
channel label would still be D3-1.

Afterward, everything seemed to be OK except that date and time had been
lost. By changing the channel, channel label numbers were corrected.
The Info button worked correctly on all other channels, but when
returning to D3-1, the problem would recur every time.

Has anyone seen this before? Is it a correctable problem? If I were to
purchase another RCA, is it likely to happen again?

Fred

 

[Fred McKenzie]

pressing the "Info" button on the
remote, the information window would first appear but the screen would
immediately be flooded with white text.

A follow-up if anyone is interested. A Google search of the model
number found a forum that was discussing a different problem
(disappearing time and date). Two or three people also mentioned having
the problem of text flooding the screen, so my experience isn't totally
unique.

Assuming the problem might be caused by corruption of a CMOS RAM
contents, it may be possible to reset the unit to factory defaults by
leaving it unplugged for an hour. No one commented about whether that
cured their text-flooding problem, and I no longer have the set to try
it.

I asked the question here in case I wanted to try another one. After
reading comments in the other forum, I realized that it would be a bad
idea.

Fred