Laptop LCD = 0.5

[pirateguy]

My Dell Inspiron 6000 is a few years old. The screen has slowly been going bad...new discolored, 1 pixel thick, vertical line every month or so. Even with the 30 odd lines I have, I like having a crap laptop just to surf the web and stuff. But yesterday the entire left half (exactly one half) of the LCD screwed up. This practically makes the laptop unusable.

There are some things that give me hope it can be fixed. For one, it actually flickers back to life every once in a while, but it is random multicolored 90% of the time. The discoloration is always different, so it would seem that the pixels are not completely broken, just not displaying the correct colors. Often it appears that I have a one inch thick vertical column of green on the far left, followed by a few inches of mostly blue...which leads me to believe the windows start button and taskbar are somehow spread upwards.

I get a full image when I connect the laptop to the monitor I'm now using, so I guess it's not the motherboard. Either the LCD or something connecting to the LCD must be messed up. I've disconnected and reconnected the video cable that sends the image to the LCD, but no luck. Any ideas?

 

[win32asmguy]

Your LCD might either have a frayed or partially disconnected cable, or it might have some damage to the top of the screen where the processing logic and individual pins go to each vertical line. If you feel technically inlined, Dell provides a service manual for your laptop here which would show you how to disassemble and troubleshoot the cable and LCD yourself. I would personally start by visually inspecting the cable and reseating it at the LCD side. If you find that the cable is not malfunctioning, then it is usually possible to find a replacement LCD off of ebay for a decent price. Probably very decent if you take the recent live discount into account. I also have a spare 15.4" WUXGA lcd that would be compatible I could sell you if you were interested.