Rest in pieces

[unixronin]

cymrullewes' Thinkpad 600E died last night.  It got knocked down onto the floor (again), landing this time directly on its Linksys WPC54G wireless card, splitting the card's casing open and driving it into the machine hard enough to bend two of the four screws that hold the card cage in place and tear one of the mounting ears.  It wouldn't boot after we picked it up.

After cymrullewes almost completely disassembled it, presuming it dead, and fixing the card cage, I took a look at it and couldn't find any obvious physical damage apart from the somewhat mangled card cage and one broken lug on the case.  Perhaps surprisingly, I was able to repair the card cage, and didn't find anything else visibly needing fixing, so I put it back together (with a little head-scratching at some screws I couldn't account for, because I hadn't realized there were screws on the back edge of the case).  To our surprise, it worked.

For a while.  Maybe an hour.  Then the display started acting progressively more and more weirdly, then started displaying only a pink band down the right side of the screen, then just four white horizontal lines, then two, and eventually quit altogether.  And it hasn't displayed a thing since.  The backlight is still working fine, and by connecting an external monitor I've verified that the graphics adapter is still working perfectly, but the screen is dead.  Something in the LCD screen must have cracked, and progressively failed once powered up again.  (I note that no cracks are visible in the screen itself.)

So ... anyone know of any inexpensive sources for a 13.3" XGA LCD screen to fit a Thinkpad 600E?

Update:

We're currently shooting for a used Thinkpad T20 off eBay as a more cost-effective replacement.

Comments

[unix-jedi.livejournal.com]

Install Gentoo!

Well, I'm glad to see that my info is totally out of date - I didn't think things had changed THAT much in the ..well, maybe it's been longer than I thought since I was dealing with/talking about those kind of parts...

I've been trying to get time to write up my latest laptop experience...

Yep, my newest work laptop is.. well.. Running.. a... variant of ... Mach and FreeBSD...

[cymrullewes.livejournal.com]

Actually, he's install gentoo on his Thinkpad. I'm not sure that I want something where I have to build world or emerge. :-)

[tomatoe333.livejournal.com]

Ubuntu FTW!

[cymrullewes.livejournal.com]

Actually, I think his Thinkpad came with Kubuntu on it.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

A non-booting Kubuntu install. There turned out to be two different hardware quirks I had to work around to get a working installation on it.

For reference:

1. The Thinkpad i1300 has an OHCI-compliant USB host controller which, however, will lock the machine hard if probed as OHCI. Workaround: Install with nousb, then configure it as a UHCI USB host controller. You'll lose a tiny amount of functionality, but it'll work, and you'll probably never miss the few added features of OHCI.


2. The Thinkpad i1300's ALi IDE controller is buggy, and if booted from a generic Linux kernel, will fail to mount the CD to complete the installation after booting from it. Workaround: when installing, boot with append="ide0=ata66 ide1=ata66 ide2=ata66 ide3=ata66", then build a custom kernel with the appropriate ALi chipset patches.

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

I still find that preferable to chancing an in place upgrade, or the reinstall cycle. I had a system that spent five years as an up to date gentoo install. I have yet to be able to accomplish anything like that with any other distro.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that's the sort of thing I have in mind ... never having to do a full reinstall again, and having something else take care of the dependency tree for me.