2003.03.07

For the past two weeks or so, the backlight of the LCD of my Thinkpad has been acting up on me. Basically, whenever I'd turn it on in the morning, it would need 5 minutes, then ten, then 20, then 40, and this morning, an hour of being "on" before finally deciding to light up my LCD and make the computer usable. This is completely unacceptable!

According to some google searches, a number of problems may cause this, including:

• dying backlight (after all, it is just a fluorescent bulb)
• screwy LCD inverter chip
• screwy cover-off switch
• act of God.

Now before I go bid $200 on eBay for a new LCD, I thought I'd take a look and see if there wasn't anything obvious that I might notice, like say, a dead dustbunny under the cover or something.

Luckily, IBM posts some Hardware Maintenance Manuals on their website that give step-by-step instructions (complete with pictures) on how to disassemble a thinkpad that are so easy, that even a stuffed koala could follow them. So here's what the insides of my thinkpad look like:

This is a shot looking down at where the keyboard used to be. Clockwise from upper left, there's the CPU (with a bunch of conductive goo on it), some random circuitry, the big "cage" thingie that the DVD drive or floppy can dock into, the place where the battery is stowed (it's completely black in this shot), the place where the hard drive goes, and the PCMCIA slots.

As you can imagine, once you've taken all the pieces apart, they're spread out over quite a big of area. (BTW, that's the little laptop hard drive to the left of the gutted laptop-CPU on the wood board there)

And here's my koala hunting for evil dustbunnies that might be hiding out in the computer.

As it is, I still have the annoying backlight-startup-delay problem, and I've managed to rule out dustbunnies, and the little cover-switch thing (the switch that gets depressed when you shut the laptop cover)...because now I've accidentally disabled that switch and it doesn't dim the screen at all. So either I'll have to shell out $200 for a new LCD, $50 for a new inverter card, or I'll just deal with it for another three months and hope it doesn't get any worse before I return the laptop to the UCB EECS department. =)