Laptop Screen Saving

The Best Buy Geek squad told me that the repair will cost me 180$. Finally, after the term was over, and when I have enough time to fiddle with it, I summed enough courage to open up the bezel myself and look under the wraps. Frankly, if you have the right screwdrivers, it is not a big deal.

The screen was working perfectly..we just needed to give some pressure to the aluminim frame.. on close inspection..we found that the aluminium frame had bent convex instead of being straight.

The screen, it turns out was working correctly. There were no loose cables as I had thought. There was a mechanical issue due to the LCD panel's aluminium frame being bent. (Gosh! when did I drop my laptop so hard?). Have put on paper clips to support the frame now. Cost to repair = cost of 2 paper clips + set of 9 awesome screwdrivers bought from India + bitta super glue + cotton to clean the dirt under the bezel.. 5$ at the most..

So, used two paper clips with the gator night bands (orange and violet) stuffed in it to apply pressure to the LCD and attempt to straighten it over time.

My professor has a netbook; he himself replaced its screen. Infact my professor wondered why I took so long to repair mine myself. My research teammate has repaired one too. What lacks in the Indian mentality is sort of "go to a repair shop and get it repaired" attitude rather than "do it yourself". Or worse is the world's super-consumer attitude: "I have enough money to buy a new one even if just a small thing goes awry. Hence I will chuck the old one and buy a new one". If only we could shed both of these wrong attitudes, world will be a lesser e-wasted place. If this happens, there will be fewer jobs, but a greener earth will be worth it.   

Lessons learnt: Hats off to Dell's wire routing. The mechanical cable connectors are too cool to be true. I wonder if we get such things in India, because the cables that I had used for my projects in India had a huge connector which used to jut out of the PCB. I guess students use it because they were affordable, and easily available locally.