Have To Share My PC From Now on.........

[Tonka777]

Oh the pain!

The missus old skool thinkpad 770x has just died, i will now officially have to share my PC with her

The old beast still starts, and appears to boot into windows, but there is no display. I'm guessing that the backlight has gone or something, might strip it down tomorrow, if she's lucky!

So, anyone got any tips to get it working, or any old cheapo laptops laying around??

[Funkstar]

If the blacklight is gone you should still be able to make out a faint image on the screen. this happened to an old laptop at work, we binned it.

How about connecting a monitor to make sure it hasn't bee switched to external VGA only.

[Tonka777]

If the blacklight is gone you should still be able to make out a faint image on the screen. this happened to an old laptop at work, we binned it.

How about connecting a monitor to make sure it hasn't bee switched to external VGA only.

Maybe its not the backlight then, i cant make out any image at all. Just tried a monitor plugged in to it but still no output. It doesn't look good!

Thanks for the suggestions.

[da_ging]

Maybe its not the backlight then, i cant make out any image at all. Just tried a monitor plugged in to it but still no output. It doesn't look good!

Thanks for the suggestions.

try looking with a torch as it can be quite hard to see with some screens

and presumably you pressed fn + f7 i think it is you need to do to switch the display to an external one ? , probably best to enter the bios with F1 or boot from a boot cd first though incase the monitor your using doesn't like the windows res/refresh rate

how do you know it is still booting in to windows btw?

[Cov]

You have tried plugging in an external monitor and still no output ?
That doesn't sound good.

In this case I would suspect the laptop screen to be alright maybe, but not the laptop itself.
How do you feel opening up the laptop carefully, making good notes of where everything goes.

I'd be curious of whether the eye can see anything unusual.

[KidChameleon]

Unless you're sure it's booting into Windows, maybe the memory is faulty. Try removing/swapping the sticks of RAM around. When they fail, the computer will turn on and spin the fans but will not display anything on the screen.

[Tonka777]

After a bit of messing around today i have managed to see an output with my monitor plugged in to it. I needed to press those fn+f7 keys to get it to switch. (thanks for that suggestion da_ging)

I could hear the windows boot sound before, and now i can see windows when i have my monitor plugged in.

I'm going to strip it down now and see if anything obvious is out of place, it wont be the first time its been apart, so hopefully i'll be able to get it back together again!

[Betty_Swallocks]

The missus old skool thinkpad 770x has just died, i will now officially have to share my PC with her

Better make sure your stash of "gentlemen's entertainment" is well concealed then.

[hibby]

You could try the service manual and see if there's anything useful in there.

[watercooled]

I found this image posted elsewhere on this forum. Give it a try:

[Tonka777]

Thanks for all the suggestions and help. I took a look inside yesterday and didn't find anything obvious that was wrong. The only new info i have about it is that i'm 99% sure that it is the backlight that has gone, with the screen at the right angle and with the sun on it i can just about make out the picture.

Managed to bag another one on ebay earlier, its supposedly faulty, but there is a picture of the windows desktop on the screen and the listed fault is indicative of it only needing a new BIOS battery.

Fingers crossed, i should be able to make one good one out of the two of em!

Thanks again for the help.

[hibby]

It's a slim possibility, but have you looked to see if there's a "lid closed" switch jammed down? Just remembered that I managed to break mine on my old thinkpad and it kept the backlight permanently turned off - my solution was to open it up and remove the plastic part of the switch so that it thought the lid was always open.

[Tonka777]

I'll check that soon, you could be on to something there, cheers!

[cheesemp]

Also it may be the backlight invertor board. They are usually in laptop lid and provide the voltage step up required to run the light. Might be as simple a job as swapping the boards over. Worked for a mates laptop.