A few weeks ago my Thinkpad (T42) screen went blank on me. At first, I thought it was just the power management causing the screen to turn off but when I tried to "wake it up", the screen wouldn't come back on. I could get the screen to come back on momentarily by toggling Fn-F7 a few times, but after about 10 seconds it went blank again. After rebooting, same thing -- 10 seconds and blank. I knew I had a problem.
However, because I've had such good experiences with Thinkpads over the years, I didn't purchase the extended warranty on this one and my standard warranty expired 6 mo's ago (doh). IBM/Lenovo told me it would cost $595 and about 5-7 business days to replace the screen. Since I had to travel the following week to teach a class, I needed a quicker (and hopefully cheaper) solution.
Upon closer inspection, I noticed that I could actually see the windows very, very dimly on the screen. However, it was so faint I couldn't see a cursor or read any text but the screen was definitely trying to project the image. So I hooked up an external monitor and the image displayed just fine. I messed around with some OS and APC settings, reinstalled the latest video driver, and uninstalled a few pieces of suspicious software but the problem persisted. At this point I was sure it was a problem with the hardware.
I began researching my situation on Google and found several helpful posts on related issues. Everything indicated that the problem was either due to a bad inverter or a bad screen. Apparently most screen backlight problems are caused by failing inverters and not the screen backlight itself (but as luck would have it, that wasn't my case). I didn't know the first thing about working with inverters but it didn't sound hard. So I downloaded the
T42 hardware maintenance manual from IBM and found the section on locating and replacing the inverter.
I bought a new inverter from ACS and gave that a try. Unfortuntely, the problem persisted so I decided it must be the screen itself. Another screen symptom I was having: whenever I first turned on the screen it would have a pink hue and it seemed to be getting dimmer than normal, but after a few minutes it would “warm up“ and the pink would go away. There were several blogs that indicated this was indeed a sign of a dying screen/backlight. So I proceeded with purchasing a new screen from ScreenTek (~$400). Installing the new screen was much easier than I anticipated -- once you get the face plate off, you just unscrew it from the braces and disconnect two cables, then you put the new one back in its place and screw everything back in. Here's what my laptop looked like with the face plate off (the inverter is the card at the bottom of the screen):
Once I replaced the screen, the problem completely disappeared (even with the old inverter). It's been running without a hitch since that time. Plus I have a bright, crisp screen again...it's almost like buying a new laptop. I hadn't realized how bad the old one was getting...the gradual change over time is deceiving but it had definitely lost its original brilliance. Since both of the vendors I used provided reasonable overnight shipping, I was able to resolve the probelm within 2 days (compared to 5-7 offered by IBM). It didn't take more than a few hours to do the actual labor thanks to the help provided by the hardware manual, and it even saved me a little money.
Screen problems can be painful. Hopefully this information will be useful to someone down the road.
Posted
Jan 19 2006, 01:44 PM
by
Aaron Skonnard