Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Dead Notebook Display - Looking for tips on dealing with it.

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Topic: Dead Notebook Display - Looking for tips on dealing with it.

Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."

Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001

posted 02-15-2009 10:52 AM

quote: Bruce Hansen
If it is the back light (or inverter) that is bad, you should still be able to see a little something on the screen by looking at it at an angle, or shining a light into it. Not enough to use the display, but that would tell you that the screen is still working.

Yeah, the LCD portion of the notebook screen still works. I can see a dim hint of the user interface stuff looking at the screen at the right angles. You can see the stuff more clearly shining a flashlight into it.

Funny thing is if I let the notebook go into screen saver mode, I get a very brief flash of the computer screen when touching the mouse to bring back the desktop. I still think the issue is a blown CCFL back-light.

Tomorrow I'm going to call a couple civic club friends of mine who run computer service businesses to see if they do any work replacing lamps or invertors in notebook displays.

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Bruce Hansen
Jedi Master Film Handler

Posts: 847
From: Stone Mountain, GA, USA
Registered: Dec 1999

posted 02-15-2009 05:50 PM

quote: Bobby Henderson
Funny thing is if I let the notebook go into screen saver mode, I get a very brief flash of the computer screen when touching the mouse to bring back the desktop.

That kink-of sounds like the inverter is trying to start, but fails right away (could be bad caps). But it could be a number of things.

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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."

Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001

posted 02-15-2009 08:58 PM

For now, I have my notebook PC jerry-rigged to where I have my HDTV screen running as a 1920 X 1080 pixel second computer monitor. I have the notebook screen dumped down to its lowest supported setting (800 X 600). Doing the flashlight trick allows me to see enough of the user interface to move application windows and such over to the HDTV screen. I don't know how long I'll be able to keep doing that.

Naturally, this situation cannot go on for any long term period of time. I'm still going to talk to a couple of computer-tech friends about fixing the display. If worse comes to worse I have a certain Dell Studio 17 notebook considered as a replacement. The good thing is I have all my data backed up off the notebook's hard disc and such. So I'm not going to lose anything if this machine just up and decides to smoke itself completely.

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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."

Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001

posted 02-20-2009 12:58 PM

Update.

A fellow F-T member did me a huge favor by shipping me a 15.4" LCD part from a decommissioned Dell notebook that was destined for the scrap heap. I'm hesitant to mention the member's name because I don't know if I would get him into any trouble over it. I greatly appreciate the favor since it saved me a good amount of money.

The replacement screen has a 1920 X 1200 resolution, which is a bit high for a 15.4" notebook. But it sure beats the alternative of paying around $500 for a factory part from Dell.

In replacing the LCD screen I could plainly see that if you lose the CCFL lamps in the screen you just have to get the entire screen. The only part that looks like it can be swapped by itself is the inverter.

Anyway, this should keep my 4 year old notebook alive for at least another year or so. That should be enough time for things like Windows 7 and better equipped notebooks to hit the market -along with me being able to get the latest Adobe Design Premium suite when I'm ready to take the plunge on a new notebook. I think my current notebook would choke big time on Photoshop CS4. Need a 64-bit notebook with a hell of a lot of RAM to run that.

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