Faulty panel buttons?

yourepicfailure

So I recently got my hands on this lovely Dell 2000FP monitor for literally nothing.


The monitor comes up, which is great considering the monitor is prone to not turning on due to an eeprom issue.
However, it does not respond to button presses. Doing a little troubleshooting, it appears each button has a resistance of ~6kohms and does not change when the button is pressed. I have confirmed there is negligable resistance when touching multimeter leads to the solder joints. I tested by placing one tip of the multimeter to one button lead, and one to the other. I ensured they were not on the same trace because, well, there is obviously no resistance if I do that.

So I guess the question is, it unheard of for all 7 buttons to just go like this?

SomeGuy

If it was exposed to some environmental condition, such as fine smoke residue, that would take out one, then logically it could take out all of them at the same time.

yourepicfailure

I guess it wasn't something I expected. Usually it's something else that goes out: loose connection, ribbon went out or even connector went out.

Luckily this this is a testament to the days before planned obsolescence. It's like Dell made it straightforward to repair. Undo some clips and screws and you can replace all electronics (minus ccfls and the panel itself) in 35 minutes or less. No tearable ribbons or surface-mount connectors that break off the board if you look at them funny. And I don't see RoHS anywhere on it so hopefully it uses "good" solder and replacing the buttons is a straight-forward process.
So I suppose replace say the power button and if that resolves it then obviously the buttons went out.

Thanks for your input.

EDIT: As suspected it does indeed use leaded solder. As a "quick fix" method (while I wait for my bag of 5,000 buttons to arrive from China) I soldered some wires to the button joints and the ground trace. From there routed through the ventilation holes and strapped to a breadboard with some push-buttons to get the basic power, auto-adjust and input change functionality. Nonetheless I will say: they don't make monitors like this anymore. Very good monitor for its age.