After the repair of a good friend's laptop I decided to dust off the first laptop I ever purchased and fix it. It has been out of comission for a couple years now (almost 6 now), but it should be up and running in no time at all!

The laptop was incredibly fast for the price that I bought it at, and it served me well for a while. However, a couple years back I was a little too tired to be on my laptop in my bed. I faded into a deep sleep one night while on my laptop and I woke up the next day to find my laptop on the floor with a dead battery and a broken D/C peripheral. After much struggle to get it apart (I was quite inexperienced) I put it away. Of course, I could never get rid of it knowing it still worked but just needed work.

Last night I dove into the revival process of my old micronpc GX3. Because it was pretty late, I didn't have access to any alcohol to clean off the processor before applying more thermal paste, so I was not able to finish the fix last night. This post is about fixing the LCD, mainly. It was definitely a simple fix.

Sadly, I did not think to document this so this thread will forever lack the disassemble process. If you ever have a hard time taking apart a laptop though, if you didn't already know already, here's a hint: There's a screw or two or three under the keyboard. The screws keeping the keyboard on will be labled on the bottom of the laptop. Remove the keyboard, and then remove the screws under the keyboard.

If you're interested in knowing how I took it apart, just follow the assembly steps backwards

Repairing the LCD portion of the laptop

After the major fall, the LCD hinges broke. Surprisingly, the hinges were not held on very tactfully. They were attached to the LCD by two 1mm ABS plastic studs. It was very surprising, seeing the laptop seems pretty rugged and well built, and two 1mm studs per hinge was quite disappointing to discover.



The LCD was not broken off completely but, as you can see, theres quite a bit of cosmetic damage to the bottom near the hinges.



The first step was to remove the rest of the screws and serparate the two pieces of the case surrounding the LCD.



You'll notice the incredibly dirty and unkept screen. After removing the case, I decided to clean it. The simplest way to clean an LCD is to use a very small amount of water and lightly rub it dry with a microfiber tower. I literally only used about three small drops of water for the whole screen and rubbed it in.



It cleaned up very nicely, and by the time I was finished it was completely spotless. I then moved on to fixing the hinges.



The hinges were still attached to the main body. They were easily removed by two screws located on the bottom of the laptop at the base of the hinge and two at the top. Four screws altogether, two on both pieces of the body, made it nice and snug on the body which helped to eliminate the sense loose-ness that my current laptop's LCD possess.



There were two plastic cosmetic pieces that covered the hinges, and they were nicely fitted yet easy to remove if done properly, which made me pretty happy. So far I've found that this laptop was very well build and rugged. The fall was pretty significant if I remember correctly, and little to no major internal damage was inflicted, thankfully.



Next I discoverd that along with the two 1mm studs there were also two metric screw holes, which I was able to utilize to put the hinges back on. This was a great discovery, but I was puzzled as to why they were not used and supplemented with the studs. It would have saved the LCD screen, I believe, and it wouldn't have been an issue.



Regardless, the repair was quite prompt. I snagged two extra screws I had lying around (sadly, I didn't have four of this size) and screwed them in tight.



After that it was just a matter of popping the plastic back together and putting the screws back in.



Or, so I thought. The hinges were marked with PL and PR. However, they were labeled backwards. That is what I get for assuming the base labled BL matched up with the piece PL. So, after I was incorrectly educated that opposites aren't not correct, I then proceeded to reassemble the LCD and put it back on the base.



I used pliers to bend the hinges to the correct angles. It was much easier to mount the hinges to he base once they lined up with the holes... Then all that was left was slapping on the cosmetics.



Next I'll be slapping some artic silver 5 on the processor, reattach the heatsink, and finish reassembling.

Very very impressive, Swivelgames; thanks for posting this! I love the amount of detail that you went into with the photos and the writeup. I'm heading to work, so I'll reread this later, but it looks like you did a great job on this repair. Did you decide what you'll be using the laptop for yet?