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

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Well, if we were wishlist shopping with a blank check, we'd just go out and buy a couple of new T60s. :) But the T20 is what's available in that price range....

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

Last I checked, the T2? series were all in the same general price range. Kind of like the break in memory prices, they climb fairly linearly, and then a big jump to the newest technology. The T2? series all used to be within about $150.00 of each other when I bought the T23. For just a bit more money, you could get a nicer system. It is really hard to upgrade components in laptops. (Even though I usually replace the drive...)

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, sure, if we could pick and choose. This particular T20 just happens to be on eBay at a too-good-to-pass-up price, so far. (I suspect it'll succumb to the usual eBay bidding frenzy and the price will shoot up by possibly as much as several hundred dollars in the last two minutes, pushing it far beyond what we can spare right now, but hey ... we could get lucky, and the auction snipers could all be watching newer, zoomier Thinkpads.)



(I hate and detest auction snipers. But that's a rant for another time. I'd like to see eBay institute a policy where no auction can close until there have been no new bids for five minutes ... but I doubt eBay will ever do that, because they make too much money off the last-second bidding frenzies.)

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

I have largely given up on doing business with ebay for just those reasons.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, me too. We occasionally venture there, but only occasionally.