better and better
Jan. 28th, 2005 19:41![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
torquillThings are getting better in all sorts of ways. At this moment, I am typing on my laptop, as I have been all along... the difference is that it is no longer shackled to the 60-pound Trinitron. Its native LCD lives again!
Back when my screen died, we had a feeling it was the cable running from the motherboard to the screen that was at fault, that it was flaky in some way. My brother Alex took the machine apart, then spent a little time wiggling things and whatnot... the cable was definitely the problem, but it was flaky in the middle of the run. Right where it bends when you open and close the lid. Urgh, said we, is it metal fatigue, and the wires just bent so often they gave up?
If so, then any used ones would also face the same fate. Time to get a new one. Problem: HP sells only the whole panel assembly, and it's one of the deals where if you return yours, they'll sell the new one to you for only $500. Hmm. A couple of weeks passed (with me using a borrowed 17" CRT), and I found a few retailers who would sell me just the cable. Great! Problem: the prices ranged from $120 to $360...
Maybe we could just make one. Or fix this one. Or... More weeks passed.
What finally happened was that Alex came over to extract the video cable from the back of the display a couple of days ago. He carefully dissected it, peered at it, and spotted a break in the insulation. The wires were so tiny, though, that we couldn't tell whether the damaged wire was just exposed to the ground wire, or cut. I took it with me to Bio lab, looked at it under the dissecting 'scope, and saw a very clean slice. Several, actually, in the neighboring wires as well, but the one wire was the only one cut all the way through. The ground wire had frayed and the resulting sharp end had sliced it.
It was not going to be easy to patch, though, as this was 7-strand, 30-gauge wire -- we're talking "thinner than a hair" strands here. And its thinness allowed it to flex with the hinge. My dad had a bright idea of bringing a piece of the wire down from the (immobile) top, replacing that top portion with solid wire, and using the resulting stranded wire as a patch for the hinge portion. He spent some of today in surgery, using magnification and making much smaller solders than I could ever hope to make. Yay for the old guard.
He also executed the plan we had devised for the ground wire: bring it outside the shielding farther up and tape it to the conductive mesh wrapping the whole bundle. It should be perfectly adequate, with no flexing to break it and no sharp edges to slice.
That done, I reassembled the whole kit and brought it up, and now it's happily working with no apparent difficulty. As Alex commented, it's nice to know that even with a laptop, there are still a few things you can fix at home. It's pretty rare.
So now I just need to get the huge monitor off my desk and things will be back to normal. I can take my computer with me again! Yay!
Back when my screen died, we had a feeling it was the cable running from the motherboard to the screen that was at fault, that it was flaky in some way. My brother Alex took the machine apart, then spent a little time wiggling things and whatnot... the cable was definitely the problem, but it was flaky in the middle of the run. Right where it bends when you open and close the lid. Urgh, said we, is it metal fatigue, and the wires just bent so often they gave up?
If so, then any used ones would also face the same fate. Time to get a new one. Problem: HP sells only the whole panel assembly, and it's one of the deals where if you return yours, they'll sell the new one to you for only $500. Hmm. A couple of weeks passed (with me using a borrowed 17" CRT), and I found a few retailers who would sell me just the cable. Great! Problem: the prices ranged from $120 to $360...
Maybe we could just make one. Or fix this one. Or... More weeks passed.
What finally happened was that Alex came over to extract the video cable from the back of the display a couple of days ago. He carefully dissected it, peered at it, and spotted a break in the insulation. The wires were so tiny, though, that we couldn't tell whether the damaged wire was just exposed to the ground wire, or cut. I took it with me to Bio lab, looked at it under the dissecting 'scope, and saw a very clean slice. Several, actually, in the neighboring wires as well, but the one wire was the only one cut all the way through. The ground wire had frayed and the resulting sharp end had sliced it.
It was not going to be easy to patch, though, as this was 7-strand, 30-gauge wire -- we're talking "thinner than a hair" strands here. And its thinness allowed it to flex with the hinge. My dad had a bright idea of bringing a piece of the wire down from the (immobile) top, replacing that top portion with solid wire, and using the resulting stranded wire as a patch for the hinge portion. He spent some of today in surgery, using magnification and making much smaller solders than I could ever hope to make. Yay for the old guard.
He also executed the plan we had devised for the ground wire: bring it outside the shielding farther up and tape it to the conductive mesh wrapping the whole bundle. It should be perfectly adequate, with no flexing to break it and no sharp edges to slice.
That done, I reassembled the whole kit and brought it up, and now it's happily working with no apparent difficulty. As Alex commented, it's nice to know that even with a laptop, there are still a few things you can fix at home. It's pretty rare.
So now I just need to get the huge monitor off my desk and things will be back to normal. I can take my computer with me again! Yay!
