Ryan Homan

Well let me first start off and say that I almost forgot how much fun it is getting parts and working on a laptop. I will probably never replace a backlight on a laptop for anyone else ever again after this experience though. Not only did I have to replace the backlight but I also had a bad invertor so I replaced that as well. It took over 3 weeks to get the 2 parts I needed. I ordered the backlight from ccfldirect.com and got the inverter off of ebay.

My advice to anyone who wants to replace a backlight is to have lots of patience. I, myself, do not have much patience so this was quite a task to put together. First off, the backlight is very fragile and great care must be taken when soldering the wires onto the end. Also, before soldering, make sure you know how much clearance there is for the solder. The space I was working with was so small I could barely get enough solder on it to hold it on. After many tries, it stuck and I started the reassembly process. The backlight has a small spot at the bottom of the LCD that it must reside but also has a reflector that must be along the backside to prevent light loss. It is very difficult to get all these parts back into their spot while also be very careful not to break the bulb. Once you get the backlight assembly installed, it is now just lots of pieces and very small screws to complete the process.

So after about 3 hours of working with this, the moment of truth was waiting. Would the panel still light up? I had been trying it often while installing the bulb in the backlight assembly, but I was worried I might have knocked the solder joints loose was trying to fit everything back together, but fortunately it worked when I turned it on. It was a great success to complete the project, but not that worthwhile for business work especially when the customer wants it back ASAP. Hope this information may be of use to any of you would wants to replace a backlight. It is not an impossible task, but just takes time and patience.

A guy I work with had his hard drive crash on his laptop. He had some valuable files on there. First we used a linux livecd of knoppix to recover some of the files. This was done by mounting it read only in linux and copying the data to the network. Some of the files were corrupt though. The next step taken was to purchase SpinRite 6.0 from grc at http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm and was able to recover even more files. This product is truely amazing. Try it out if you have files you can’t get off a bad hard drive. Its only $89 for 1 license. Please comment if you have any success stories with it or other recommendations.

I received a laptop from someone who said the screen wasn’t working. After doing some testing, I verified that the backlight was out. Just FYI: It is a very tedious process to get the LCD panel unassembled to get to the backlight. Once I got the backlight out I went online and looked around on how to replace it. I found out I could order one rather cheaply from www.ccfldirect.com. They just ask for the vertical and horizontal measurements and the model of the computer and then you can place the order. To replace the connectors on the end of the bulb, some soldering will be necessary. I will let you know once I receive the part and complete the operation.