Need help for a friends A31

[ken3983]

I installed XP on a friends A31. Its a 2652-C3U model with a P4 1.6 in it. The only thing is that the display is out. I connected an external monitor to see what I was doing until I got finished with the installation. I did some searching on here and I can't determine if its the inverter or the CFL. On boot up, the IBM logo appeared briefly then disappeared, I could hit FN + F7 and it came up for a second then off again. Looks like the inverter is pretty easy to install, but I'm not getting near the CFL. Besides, its not mine and I 'anit gonna break it and wind up paying for it. Any suggesstions?

Ken

[Harryc]

One idea is to get an entire LCD assembly. It comes with the inverter and CCFL.

[ken3983]

Well...I might of narrowed it down. I started up XP on an external monitor and could VERY VERY faintly see the same thing on the laptop screen. All this was donw in a dark room to make sure if there was even an image on the laptop screen. Now.... if the inverter was bad, would I even see an image or nothing at all? I'm thinking the CFL is gone and is just too dim to display anything.

Ken

[ajkula66]

It's CCFL or the motherboard. Not to scare you, but I've seen machines with the exact same symptoms where it turned out that the board was bad in the end.

Good luck.

[frankiepankie]

Why not blame the inverter as defective? Without a good working inverter, your CCFL will never light up

You have 3 options:

• CCFL defective - Cheapest part - Fairly easy to replace
  Inverter defective - Fairly cheap - Easy to replace
  Motherboard defective - Expensive - Not easy to replace