I’M BACK ON MY NEW(ly refurbished) PC!!

I’m totally jazzed, not only at having my own PC back, but also at the fact that I did the repair myself. One year ago this month, the backlight in my laptop’s LCD screen burned out. After some troubleshooting and researching, I discovered that I could fix the panel myself by replacing the flourescent tube; BTW, this light is about 13″ long and roughly the diameter of a strand of dried spaghetti pasta…VERY delicate. I found about 3 (two for just-in-case backups) for about $20. I thought I was making out like a bandit; $20 repair versus $1500 for a new laptop…outstanding!

Well, my joy was short lived. About the time the new lamp arrived, I got a nasty cold/flu. I couldn’t go more than about 20 seconds without trying to cough up a lung, so there was no way I could work on delicate electronics in that state. So about a week later I sit down to try to make this repair. Getting the lamp out, although a delicate process, was simple enough; the next step was to cut the wires at either end and solder them to the new lamp…and trim the lamp leads to the correct length. No problem, got that done. Here’s where the trouble happened: trying to get the lamp back in its reflective holder and re-mounting it to the LCD panel. I couldn’t do it. I swear it seems like you need five hands to accomplish this task, or maybe it’s something simple I haven’t figured out yet.

So, having admitted defeat with this, I go online again to find an entire LCD panel. I received this several months ago, and for whatever reason(s), I’d been putting off installing the panel until a few days ago. I installed the panel and replaced all the screws and the screen bezel, plugged the laptop into the AC, crossed my fingers (it had been off for a year…no telling what might happen, or if anything would happen), and turned on the power. It started up (HOORAY!), and went to some error message about CMOS something or other (maybe the little battery was low or something) I told it to proceed with the boot and it went into Windows. Well, it turns out the battery had indeed lost power or gone too low, because the date had reset to December of 1999. Because of that, several of my programs were screaming bloody murder at me about the date being wrong and operating outside of valid dates, etc.

It’s almost sorted out now. All the majors are back in place, just re-tuning some of the things I worked with regularly. As for the original panel, it still works (or rather it did last year), and someday I’ll sit down with it again to try and restore it to its former glory. For now, I’m just going to bask in the glow of my now working laptop’s new(ish) monitor. There IS a lesson to be learned here. If you’re the least bit mechanically/electronically inclined and you have broken hardware, give the option of repair some serious consideration before you replace your hardware outright. You might get the satisfaction of a job well done, and possibly develop a talent you could farm out for various favors and what not…and let’s not forget the $aving$, eh?!!