Thursday, November 06, 2008

Laptop Surgery - Patient Pulled Through, Resting Comfortably

About 2 weeks ago, the LCD screen on my laptop stopped working. Then, mysteriously, it started up again. A couple days ago, it went out again. The laptop was fine - it was just no longer a laptop, as it had to be tethered to my screen.

The folks at Dell were nice enough to ship me out replacement parts in a hurry, and tonight I was planning to perform major surgery on laptop, swapping out the LCD screen.

I took a slightly different approach this time to repairing my laptop. Rather than just diving in and unscrewing things, I setup my work space, prepared the instructions and methodically followed every step. Who knew there were manuals that gave you such detailed advice as:

Starting on the right side of the computer, use a plastic scribe (inserted into the indent) to pry up the hinge cover. Lift the cover away from the computer going from the right toward the left, and then lay the cover aside

And here, I thought the best approach was to jam a screwdriver under the plastic and yank. I guess their approach works too.

Once I had the laptop's guts fully exposed, I realized what my hunch was all along: the LCD cable had come disconnected. I reconnected it, and the laptop screen works, good as new.

I think just have the pristine parts next to me, and calmly taking things apart, made all the difference.

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