600E woes

[MDBenson]

Hi, I have a 600E I purchased from eBay a while back, which was working save for the CDROM bay unit which I dropped a DVD drive into.

I had it all the way apart this weekend past to thoroughly de-gunk some of the panels where the rubberised coating had failed and turned to goop. Primarily the lid shell which was especially bad but after a few soakings in warm isopropyl alcohol actually cleaned up real well. I wish I could say the same about the palm rest which revealed it has a coat of silver EM reflective coating under the matt finish!

Anyhow, I reassembled it after the case pieces were thoroughly dry and it fired up right away and worked just great. Until the LCD failed. It didn’t show any signs of going bad, it just worked one second then the next time I powered it in it showed a bunch of random black and white flashing garbage, then after powering it off and on again the screen shows nothing. The laptop is still working as it successfully posts and tries to boot from the HDD and CDROM. The LCD backlight is fine so it’s not an inverter failure, the actual LCD panel has died.

I tried reseating both ends of the LCD ribbon and checked for nicks or tears in it and I can’t find anything obvious.

I also found a restore disk on archive.org and was in the process of doing a factory restore when the LCD quit in me.

I’m kinda bummed as it’s such a nice little unit, I wanted a little Win98/2000 system to tote around to retro club meetings and use as a remote terminal and stuff.

I am guessing it’s going to be a case of posting in tge Marketplace and hoping someone has a replacement?