Thinkpads Forum

My external monitor has developed a problem. It is a 4 year old 17" SXGA LCD (IBM L170p FRU 31P9584).

It comes on, stays on for a few seconds and then the screen goes blank. The power LED is a steady Green. A faint image can be made out on the screen. There is no red tinge to the image when it is displayed.

Plugging in another laptop or computer results in the same symptoms.


My thoughts are that it is most likely inverter related. Either the inverter is faulty, or the CCFL is faulty causing the inverter to shut off after a few seconds.

What should my next step be:
- replace inverter
- replace CCFL
- buy new monitor

Thanks for any suggestions.

David

Having had some experience replacing screens, here is what I know:

If you can shine a flashlight or bright sunny window into the screen and see an image, then probably CCFL is burnt out. I think this is a common problem that everyone with LCD screens will eventually encounter. My solution was to purchase a made-up LCD on eBay for about $75 and it was pretty painless to replace an entire unit. Maybe you can take off the bezel and identify what LCD units would fit into your frame.

Please see my post about my adventures with same and amateur CCFL replacement: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... highlight=, where basically I think it is very hard to do correctly.

On the laptop which got the screen replacement; my cat sometimes sits on the laptop which somehow disconnects the inverter from the LCD cabling and I have to take the bezel off and re-seat the inverter and it works again. This also shows the same symptoms as above (image can be seen in the black screen with a flashlight).

Thanks for the reply.

I've since dismantled the unit. Unlike a laptop the power supply and inverter share a common board.

It is not a burnt out CCFL, as this screen has them top and bottom (very unlikely they'd go together) - and the screen does display an image for a couple of seconds when first turned on. Yes, you can see a very faint image once the backlight goes off so the image driver board is OK.

Next stop is to take it to a friend who is a TV serviceman. His initial guess - a faulty $2 capacitor on the inverter board.

http://www.techforless.com/cgi-bin/tech ... &mv_pc=246

That is an amazing website. I bought that exact same monitor and I love it. It's pretty cheap if you get it refurbished, which is what I got. They don't currently have any IBM monitors, but they do pop in occasionally.