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Jul. 11th, 2009 12:33 pmSo my beloved tablet is in rather ill health. (And yeah, the timing sucks. On the up side, I started this month with one computer, and it's looking more and more like I'm going to end it with three. On the down side... Ow! My wallet! Gods I hate spending money... The pleasant side effect of this general attitude is that I have the money. And even temporary and partial lack of access to my computer stuff is really annoying. Yes, all my data was backed up. It's still annoying.)
I replaced the blown fuse on the mainboard. (And yeeps! The darn thing was less than a mm on a side. Fine soldering tip and dissecting scope FTW - and Chris, my mentor, also wins - and I think I'm going to get myself a Weller workstation once I get over the stickershock from this month. Which might, admittedly, take a while.) The screen backlight briefly lit, and then failed again. This time the fuse did not blow. I replaced the hinge cable assembly, put everything back together, and before I started it up again there were sparks near where the cable assembly connects to the mainboard. Briefly. And again, the computer boots up just fine, but no backlight.
I suppose it could be the inverter card. I will check that before I make the next steps. But really, I'm thinking mainboard.
Which, BTW, will cost around $500 to replace. (Well, a bit less off of ebay. Still.) (And why are they routing the backlight power through the mainboard? Does this strike anyone else as kind of a bad idea? Or maybe I'm misunderstanding part of this, since after all this isn't open hardware so I don't have real schematics, though the maintenance manuals are better than with pretty much anyone else.)
Of course, there's no reason I can't use the video out to hook it up to a monitor and have a fairly energy efficient little machine - at least none I can see, so I'm trying that this afternoon. (And perhaps I'll be more aggressive about server maintenance if I own the server in question. After the harddrive died on the house server a while ago, I haven't been moved to finish setting it up properly - works as a box, but DNS doesn't point there, and I never reinstalled unison...) And while I'm at that, I'm finally getting around to grabbing some shelves so that both our printers have real homes, and the server can be reached comfortably.
As it happens, I can pick up another tablet for around $650. It won't have as nice a screen as my current one, though. OTOH, the screen on my current one is fine, excepting that the backlight isn't getting any power.
So. Here's the question:
Is there any reason I can't just swap my old screen into the new box? I can't see any (and I've posted on the lenovo forums - but it's been 18 hours! and no one's answered!) but then this is the first time I've done this level of mucking around in laptop hardware.
This is also a fine time for someone to tell me about $SomeOtherTablet that I should really get instead. Keep in mind, though, that the resolution on my current tablet is a lot of what my it My Precious, and I'm not seeing any other tablets with that kind of screen quality. (And why is it that most consumers don't care about resolution on laptops, even though apparently they do on their television - think about how much closer you generally sit to your laptops. No, really. It matter that much. The technology has been there for years, and yet apparently the demand is not there...)
I replaced the blown fuse on the mainboard. (And yeeps! The darn thing was less than a mm on a side. Fine soldering tip and dissecting scope FTW - and Chris, my mentor, also wins - and I think I'm going to get myself a Weller workstation once I get over the stickershock from this month. Which might, admittedly, take a while.) The screen backlight briefly lit, and then failed again. This time the fuse did not blow. I replaced the hinge cable assembly, put everything back together, and before I started it up again there were sparks near where the cable assembly connects to the mainboard. Briefly. And again, the computer boots up just fine, but no backlight.
I suppose it could be the inverter card. I will check that before I make the next steps. But really, I'm thinking mainboard.
Which, BTW, will cost around $500 to replace. (Well, a bit less off of ebay. Still.) (And why are they routing the backlight power through the mainboard? Does this strike anyone else as kind of a bad idea? Or maybe I'm misunderstanding part of this, since after all this isn't open hardware so I don't have real schematics, though the maintenance manuals are better than with pretty much anyone else.)
Of course, there's no reason I can't use the video out to hook it up to a monitor and have a fairly energy efficient little machine - at least none I can see, so I'm trying that this afternoon. (And perhaps I'll be more aggressive about server maintenance if I own the server in question. After the harddrive died on the house server a while ago, I haven't been moved to finish setting it up properly - works as a box, but DNS doesn't point there, and I never reinstalled unison...) And while I'm at that, I'm finally getting around to grabbing some shelves so that both our printers have real homes, and the server can be reached comfortably.
As it happens, I can pick up another tablet for around $650. It won't have as nice a screen as my current one, though. OTOH, the screen on my current one is fine, excepting that the backlight isn't getting any power.
So. Here's the question:
Is there any reason I can't just swap my old screen into the new box? I can't see any (and I've posted on the lenovo forums - but it's been 18 hours! and no one's answered!) but then this is the first time I've done this level of mucking around in laptop hardware.
This is also a fine time for someone to tell me about $SomeOtherTablet that I should really get instead. Keep in mind, though, that the resolution on my current tablet is a lot of what my it My Precious, and I'm not seeing any other tablets with that kind of screen quality. (And why is it that most consumers don't care about resolution on laptops, even though apparently they do on their television - think about how much closer you generally sit to your laptops. No, really. It matter that much. The technology has been there for years, and yet apparently the demand is not there...)
