Thinkpads Forum

Hey ThinkPadders!

I'm posting this here because the issue was present in a T510 but it's actually a generic question about an LCD.

Long story short: I got me a T510 with a defective motherboard which I replaced with a W510 one I had lying around. After putting a quad CPU and RAM I turned it on and see a white vertical line in the LCD. I didn't bother since it was a 1600x900 panel I was going to replace anyway with a FHD one, so I started installing Debian and ignored the white line.

After the installation I started fine tunning the system and at a point of time (I actually didn't notice when) the white line was gone

I though it would be a temporary thing but in fact it kept working fine until the moment I removed it to make place to the FHD panel several days later.

Can anybody explain why it happened? I'm keeping the panel in case I need one as temporary replacement. But I'd like to understand more how it "repaired" itself. I though a dead line will stay like that forever...

Thanks a lot in advance!

If you ever take a (bad or cracked) screen apart, you'll see that all along the top of the LCD there are hundreds of "printed" or etched wires going into the top of the panel itself.
They are leads from the electronics panel to light up the pixels.
Those wire-bunches look a bit like see-through LCD-cables (which is what they really are )
If one or more of these wires gets loose or disconnected, you'll get the vertical stripe(s).
The stripes indicate that some wires have gone haywire.
If not too much disturbed, such a lose connection can 'repair' itself, by 'falling' back in place.
Or you may get lucky when trying to press it back into place.
It will keep working fine, as long as you don't move it around too much.

RealBlackStuff wrote:The stripes indicate that some wires have gone haywire.

^^Priceless

Thanks for the info btw!

I remember the trick of "pressing" the borders to check if the image get corrected but in this particular case I did nothing since I wasn't planning to keep the panel anyway.

But now that it kind of works I will put the panel in storage, hopefully it stays ok in case I need it for any emergency.