<rant>
Hey,
I never have good luck with laptops. Probably cause I buy ‘em used and cheap. So right now, I have a Compaq Presario 2100 amd 2600+M, 1gb ram. Nothing special. The DVD rom doesn’t work, tried about 3-4 different drives. Can’t flash the bios.. had to setup a network install from win2000 server to put XP on it.
Anyway, the latest issue. The backlight stopped working. Doing some research, I narrowed it down to two things. 1. The ballast/inverter for the tube, or the tube itself.
So yesterday, I took the screen apart. Swapped out the ballast/inverter for one from another busted laptop my friend wanted me to fix for him (ya, right). It worked, but was super dim and didn’t react to my dim/bright function keys. Figured it was the light and ballast/inverter combo. So after measuring the width of the screens, out comes the xacto blade and some patience to cut through the tape that says “do not touch” and undo some mini screws to pull out the lights to swap them.
I did a pretest before I put any back together. The ‘new’ light is a little brighter than the old. So just before I put in the ‘new’ light, I did a side by side comparison. The ‘new’ one is literally 1.5mm longer. Shit.
Put it all back together and so on, but in my haste, I accidentally did some minor damage to one of the layers of the screen and now have some black on the left corner.
Oh well. Maybe I’ll actually get a new new one sometime.
</rant>
Thu Apr 04, 2013 2:20 pm by 
Calendar