Laptop screen repair/replacement

If you're like me and at some point the monitor on your laptop has just decided to stop working due to a cracked display/screen whiting out/other lcd display malfunction, then hopefully this next post will be somewhat helpful for you. Some shops will charge up to $600 plus S&H handling for this type of repair. I dunno about you, but if I can find a way to cut down on that some, you bet I will.

***Warning, the following repair was done with a specialized toolset and technician has extensive experience dealing with computer internals and cases. Do not try unless you are comfortable assuming the risk this repair takes***

Now assuming the above message didn't deter you, let's figure out why my friend's HP Elitebook 8530p is giving us such a headache.

When starting up the laptop, it would randomly decide to load a pure white screen for about a month. After that it would only load this white screen and nothing else. The first line of thought was that it could be a number of things:

1.) Virus (specifically whitescreen.exe)
2.) Bad graphics card (requires new motherboard, ouch!)
3.) Bad Display
4.) Loose power/signal cable
5.) Bad inverter board (power inverter for lcd screen)

Before halfstepping the issue, there is one thing you can do to check almost any laptop for the first two items on this list that is pretty simple. Most laptops have an external "monitor out" of some kind and will allow you to connect a second monitor to the laptop. This is very useful in troubleshooting display problems.

(sorry no pictures from this step)

Suffice it to say, when the laptop was connected using the VGA out to an external monitor, it powered up without a single issue.


1.) Virus
2.) Bad graphics card
3.) Bad Display
4.) Loose power/signal cable
5.) Bad inverter board


Allright!, easy steps eliminated two of the five items. Now we have to crack open the case. I was lucky to find the "end of life dissasembly instructions" online for this model with a very well documented photo process for taking this particular laptop apart. Made my life a LOT easier because of all the hidden screws in the body. Eventually we were able to get it apart :)

The first thing I made sure to do was a thorough visual inspection of all cable connections internal to the computer. The pins on the graphics card, power lines for the display and any other pins I thought might be related I *very carefully* removed, inspected and re-seated. After this I tried a power on and still got the same error.

(The power cable for the monitor connected to the inverter board, everything looked good to this point.)

     After the visual inspection didn't provide any results I could pretty assuredly cancel out loose/bad cables as an issue. (without a cable tester and a multimeter there was no way to bee 100% positive, but if further troubleshooting didn't fix then I know to get ahold of one and come back to this step.)

Sooo...

1.) Virus 

2.) Bad graphics card 

3.) Bad Display

4.) Loose power/signal cable

5.) Bad inverter board 

Now I had just one item left, and fortunately these can be found for "relatively" cheap online. (compared to the $600 service fee I saw quoted at my university's school store for this full repair process.)

Once the item was shipped in it took no more than 2 minutes to swap out the monitors through a video and power cable (just like an external monitor, nothing fancy here.)

Felt pretty good to see the whole computer up and running after this and decided to leave it apart for the time being. (after all when there's stuff like this to be done, and you have a disassembled/functional laptop, why not?)

Success!