T42 Reassembly Woes

[ArtShapiro]

Just need to cry on someone's shoulder right now, so bear with me!

I'm the clown who ran over his T42 several weeks ago. Happily the failure was purely the screen; the rather amazing computer drove an external monitor just fine.

I initially thought I'd just taken out the backlight, but upon looking closer I could see cracks and blotches in the LCD panel itself. Sigh. And there was a slight rip in the lid itself - nothing severe but enough to irk me.

So I purchased a replacement SXGA+ panel and lid on eBay, a few hours before James posted the same thing for sale at a lower price than I paid.

It came, and despite being very well packaged one of the hinges actually had fractured in shipment. That's a pretty good trick; those hinges are pretty substantial hunks o' metal.

As taking apart the lid is harder than taking apart the laptop, I let the problem age a bit, but finally took both lids apart and swapped hinges yesterday. I'm not sure I got all the wiring the exact way IBM intended, but it got back together. And I had a LOT of trouble with the little two-piece plastic pseudo-hinge that surrounds the ribbon cable at the flex point; I'm still not sure I have it oriented correctly.

Putting the laptop back together, I couldn't get the "main" lead on the wireless mini-PCI card to snap on. Tried for the better part of an hour; the "aux" lead went on fine. Even through a magnifier lamp, my aging eyes couldn't tell if the card or the wire connector had smushed a little. As I was most interested in making sure the video was OK, I left it dangling and reassembled the unit. (Any advice?)

I powered up the unit, and got no video. I hooked up an external monitor, and got a good image. Then the video magically appeared on the Thinkpad. It turns out I have a sporadic connection somewhere. The video goes and comes as I open or close the lid a little, or sometimes on its own, or if I gently tap things. At least it's obviously a good screen with a nice, vivid image - when it works! Guess I have to take everything apart all over again and see where there might be a loose connection.

I'm fairly discouraged right now. I have several other Thinkpads but this is the only one with resolution better than 1024x768. At least the wireless appears to be working fine with only the Aux antenna.

Art

[Brad]

Sorry to hear of your trouble.

Handing Art a box of Kleenex.....

I am not sure from your post if your LCD cable was replaced or not. Sounds to me like the cable could be bad. Maybe during the crushing the cable failed if in fact you are using the same cable. If not and the cable is from eBay maybe the cable has a bad connection and connects or not when you reposition the lid.

The wireless leads are not the easiest to reattach. When I don't have to I always leave them attached. What I usually do to snap them in place is gently move the cap into position above the connector then use my thumbnail to snap it into place. This usually works for me. In the HMM there is reference to a special tool just for this purpose.

Try going back in a few hours or days and usually the problems will disappear quickly. This doesn't work with my wife though.

Brad

[ArtShapiro]

Thanks for the reply - the new assembly had its own cable, visually fine, which I used. I'm not anxious to swap cables, obviously - that's a fair amount of grief. My inclination would be to reassemble the laptop without the two pieces of the keyboard bezel and palmrest, to let me poke around while it is booted up and running, and to similarly open up the lid while it's running to jiggle that end of the cable.

Art

[Brad]

That sounds to me like an excellent way to being troubleshooting.

Brad

[closersource]

Art, as to the wireless snap in, the central pin is probably bent too much for insertion. Use a mechanical pencil to straighten it out. As to the LCD sounds like either a loose cable, or that your wires are slightly depressing the "turn LCD off while lid closed" pressure mechanism... You can try disabling that in windows using an external monitor, (or figure out what is pressing the mechanism). If that is not the source of your problem then all things point to a loose connection. Hope this helps.