whats the hell's a thunder fly??i've never heard of them!!

When I come back to this post I have to scroll down really fast to make sure I don't see that sodding spider again...lol

Thunder flies are also called midges arn't they?

That pic is really unpleasant (shudder). Loki would try and eat it.

Thunderflies are these tiny black flying things that appear suddenly en masse, get everywhere, then disappear for another year ... UNLESS they end up trapped inside the laptop screen, where they die and stay there, seemingly FOREVER. :smt088

I know what you mean, Steve, I keep mistaking them for all sorts of letters and punctuation. Three is a bit much.

Hi there Lucky Star,
For a year, significantly, I have been accusing my girlfriend of killing 5 adjacent pixels on my Samsung 940bf because she flicked the screen in a fit of demonstrative exclamation. I bought myself an identical monitor only to see one of these little beggers running around aimlessly underneath the plastic screen cover. So I fully believe you and sympathise. Does anyone know how to retrieve these kritters once their little clockwork finally runs out?

. No, they died eventually and remained there all the time I had the laptop.

Ok, I've had a go this evening after reading a few suggestions google turned up.

Firstly, any notion of drying out the dead bodies in the hope of getting them to drop to the bottom by heating the screen with a halogen bulb carries the risk of leaving you with a yellow burn blotch so I wouldn't do that.

Alot of people will warn you against taking your monitor apart to remove them but I did just that and it worked!
wear some nitrile gloves so as not to replace dead bugs with finger prints and an anti static wrist strap in case your monitor's devices are static sensitive.
I had to keep blowing new flies from landing on the numerous screen layers so this is not going to stop them coming back.

Other preventative suggestions include wiping the non screen parts of the monitor with an insecticide with perethrin as its active ingredient and sticking fly paper or medical micro tape round the air vents and ports on the back which I will try tomorrow.