Chris, I've been a monitor technician for 15 years and I can tell you that it is possible for a bad CRT to go bad with seamingly low usage. Although extremely rarely, the guns inside the tube can get shorted, which could cause a power supply shutdown condition. To isolate this problem, pull the CRT neck off the back of the CRT and try to start it up. If you get high voltage and possibly audio, you'll know the tube is bad and you can assume everything else is OK. The only other condition you'll see in a bad CRT is low brightness and/or poor color contrast. And this won't cause the TV to be dead. Hope this helps.

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