So… The second worst thing that happened on February 17th was that I slipped and fell on the ice while taking out the garbage on my way to California and I shattered the LCD on my until-recently trusty computer. (The worst thing was that my absolutely wonderful girlfriend woke up with a terrible case of food poisoning.)

You can see the results of the carnage here:



Getting it repaired by IBM/Lenovo would have cost about $1000 which I wasn’t willing to pay. I could have gotten a brand new LCD from ScreenTek who seemed pretty reputable. In the end, though, I decided to buy a used LCD and cover off of eBay for a total of about $165. (I figured that the hardware is starting to get obsolete, so shelling out $400 for a brand new LCD wasn’t worth it. Of course, I have some concerns that my replacement cover is from a T40, but I still have the original inverter and other parts from my computer, so I figure I can swap those in if anything fails.)

Anyway, I just wanted to record my process and some of the “gotchas” along the way.

  1. (of course) Unplug the power cord and the battery pack.
  2. Remove the keyboard and wristpad/bezel screws from the bottom of the computer. They have little pictures to indicate the correct screws. The keyboard screws have a little picture of a keyboard and the wristpad screws have a rectangle with 4 little dots on it (there are a lot of these). Of course, you’ll want to keep the screws in a safe place and preferably separated by number (each screw hole should have a number by it to tell you which screw fits). You may not need to remove the section that has the touchpad, but I did… To remove that, you’ll need to use a small screwdriver or blade to remove the screw covers.
  3. Remove the keyboard. This may be helpful. It basically comes right off with a little pressure. You may want to snap off the separate plastic piece on top of the power button/volume/Access IBM buttons… That just came off on mine while I was fiddling with stuff. Be a little careful with the keyboard connector, but I didn’t have any problems.
  4. Remove the touchpad piece. As I mentioned before, I’m not sure that this is necessary, but I did it. Again, it came right off and be a little careful with the connector.
  5. Remove the rest of the bezel. I needed to remove an additional screw on the top of the machine to get this off. It was on the left hand side (as you face the computer) near the PCMCIA slot.
  6. Remove the screws for the hinges. These are not labeled but most are obvious. There are 3 on the right and 4 on the left. Each have 2 on the back and 1 on the bottom. The left side has an additional one on top that isn’t revealed until you remove the bezel.
  1. Disconnect the antennae from the wireless card. These should snap off with minimal pressure. Just wiggle ‘em around a little.
  1. Unthread the antennae carefully from the machine. Note how they go, but it shouldn’t be hard to figure out how to get the new ones in place.
  2. Remove lid and swap in new one!
  1. Now you just need to reverse the steps from above. Nothing particularly tricky… just be careful.

Voila! I’m working on a good screen again. Hooray!




One minor sadness… I DO have a single misfiring pixel on my screen although it had been working fine before it was sent to me (according to the vendor). I tried to repair it by flashing it with a video file I found here. That didn’t seem to work, but I may try again.

I could, of course, have sent the screen back, but it was enough of an ordeal… I’ll live with it!