Fixing a Toshiba Laptop LCD Screen

We have a Toshiba Laptop — a Toshiba Satellite 1805-S274 if you must know — which my wife bought from a person at my wife’s office. Not long after the purchase, we noticed the screen would just go black, and waking it up had nothing to do with moving the mouse, hitting the “close-switch” or powering back up.

Then one day I noticed it wasn’t actually black, that there was a faint image of what was just on the screen a moment ago. Like the screen was operating at 2% of its normal light output. I found that pushing the lid-close-switch (the little spring-loaded button that shuts down your laptop when you close it, much like the switch that turns off the light in your drier [you didn’t know the light goes off in your drier?]) would flash the screen off and then bright again, but in a second or less, the screen would go black — er… 2%. Anyway, using all this scientific and logical processing I was able to determine that 1) there was something wrong, and 2) I had no idea how to fix it. Oh, and 3) it was going to be expensive to have it repaired.

Now, I still have rattling around in my otherwise mushy noggin a piece of sage advice my late father spoke to me well back in my teens:

Electronic parts usually don’t just go bad.

With a corollary sage-byte:

Usually reseating — disconnecting then reconnecting — the original joint of the suspect parts or connectors will be all that is necessary to correct what is probably a corrosion or dirt issue.

So naturally, I thought in my oil-paint-tainted mind: I can fix this. There was only one problem and that was that I had no idea how to get to the part that was perhaps connected poorly, coupled with the fact that I had no idea what that part actually was, or where it might be located.

Hats off to real geeks

I’m not a real geek, I just play one at home. There is a deeply curious part of my psyche that is dangerous in the event I choose to open a computer repair store, but otherwise harmless, and to be honest, generally quite useful. I have repaired a number of vacuum cleaners, clocks, stereos, and all sorts of things, just by being curious enough to look under the hood and usually just unseating and then reseating something inside.

I’m not a
real geek
I just play
one at homeWomen swoon, and men glory in my apparent brilliance, when I in fact know it is 3 parts dumb luck and 2 parts curiosity and also 1 part not worrying so much since my wife bought the laptop.

Enter the real geeks, the real heroes in the world who rightly own everything and live in fabulous wealth. I found several sites on the Internet that actually show pictures on how to take a laptop apart and some geeks put these sites there. Thanks geeks! Or should I say nerds? I dunno. I am grateful anyay.

So I dug in and started taking it apart.

I first removed the uppermost panel where the power switch and a couple of other buttons are. It was as simple as inserting a small screwdriver and twisting [Picture] then simply peeling the panel off [Picture] (which clicks as the little plastic grips unsnap). Removing the keyboard was as simple as removing 2 screws and lifting it out [Picture].

Now, if you are thinking, “But David, removing the keyboard and cooling fan over the CPU will not allow you to access the connection points of the FL inverter which rests behind the LCD matrix” then you are way ahead of me. And I have no idea what you just thought. Perhaps you are thinking I didn’t need to remove any of that stuff, rather that I should have disassembled the upper part of the LCD clamshell.

And it turns out you’re correct.

It seems that the LCD screen is basically a computerized, high-speed version of a Lite-Briteâ„¢ only without the Suzy Homemaker Easy-Bake Ovenâ„¢ light-bulb in it. In other words, an LCD is like the front of the Lite-Brite only [sans light bulb], and without a light source behind it, you’ll probably leave it in your closet or under your bed to get dusty and forgotten and stop playing with it, and then cry when your mom sells it at the garage sale because you don’t use it.

Well, as I found out from the hero geek sites, there is a large flat fluorescent light panel that sits behind the Lite-Brite… I mean the LCD… and it is what allows you to enjoy the colors displayed on this LCD screen. If that light is faulty it’s like the bulb in your Lite-Brite going out. The picture is still there, you just can’t see it or enjoy it as well.

Well, the geek sites told me there was a thing called an FL inverter that essentially rests between the power source and the Fluorescent Panel and regulates the power to said panel. After removing the LCD’s bezel by removing screws and then snapping it off, I was able to disconnect the otherwise loose fluorescent panel by unplugging the data/power cable (see dotted line [Picture]) and reveal the FL inverter, which came loose after removing one screw [Picture]).

I unplugged the connectors at both ends of the FL inverter, and reseated them (connected them again) [Picture]. In some of the reading I did, it turns out that FL inverters cost about $35 – $75 and are the most common reason LCD panels stop working. And now you know you can replace it yourself!

But I did not need to replace mine at all… the LCD works perfectly now, having only reseated the connectors on each end!

Total Time: 75 minutes.
Could do it again Time: 7 minutes