h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Mrs G bought a very nice laptop computer when we were over in Seattle at Easter last year. It was reasonably fast, had a big bright screen and had Windows Vista, which makes it really easy and nice to use.

A few weeks ago, she was sorting out some of the choir accounts on it while watching television. I heard a crash and ran in to find the laptop on the floor. The screen was completely shattered, showing white, blobs of black and a few coloured lines. It was obvious that it could not be fixed.

We looked around over the last few weeks, thinking about getting a replacement laptop, which would be expensive, probably about €800 - €1,000 to get the equivalent. Then I found a website which sells replacement screens and gives instructions on how to fit them.

The replacement screen arrived by courier yesterday, and I spent the afternoon dismantling the laptop. This is not for the faint-hearted. You have to be very careful; there are about 30 small screws to be removed, in the correct order without any instructions, and if you press in the wrong place or pull something without having removed all the screws that hold it, you could snap it. Eventually after about an hour and a half of work, I had the new screen connected. Although I hadn't reassembled the laptop, I know enough about electronics to see that it could be turned on safely. So I reconnected the battery and switched on. After a minute or so, I heard the cheerful "New York, New York" theme which shows Vista has started up correctly. But nothing on the screen.

I turned it off again and checked the connections - one of them hadn't been pushed in fully. A minute later, the screen was working perfectly. I reassembled the whole thing which took about 20 minutes - I had very carefully written down every single step of disassembly, so I just had to do it all in reverse.

Now the laptop is working again, although I think that the new screen is not quite as bright as the old one was. She'll just have to turn down the lights in the room when she's working.

Total cost: £89.

Cor!

My fear of attempting repairs was overcome when a friend, whose father ran a small recording studio, gave me some advice:

'Electrical goods are designed to be assembled by cheap labour. How difficult can it be?'

I'd have been too scared there was something else broken in the laptop to try that to be honest

Knowing my luck I'd have forked out on the screen only to discover the motherboard was kaput as well.

Oh, and electronic equipment may be designed to be assembled by cheap labour - but generally it's also designed that once it's been assembled it stays that way - I lose count of the number of times I've broken vital plastic tabs on various pieces of electronic equipment because they just weren't designed to be removed...

Congratulations on your bravery Gnomon

The best bit of DIY electronics I ever did was to fit a hard disk on a card to an early IBM PC - the card didn't fit, and I had to literally saw it in half. I could see that the card had electronics on one side and the disk on the other side. They were connected by loose cables, so sawing the thing in half didn't break any electrical connections. They I used bits of my old Meccano set to connect them together in a different configuration.

How many people here still have their old Meccano set somewhere?

I still have my old mecano set in my Father's loft... A mixtur eof the relaly old proper* metal mecano and some of the awful more recent plastic mecano
Also If memory serves me correct I have some of my mecano in my house; namely a couple of the small nuts and bolts holding parts of my oldest electric guitar together (they were just the right side for holding some of the inner bits of electrics to the housing)

I'm being electronically baffled at the moment by my expensive pro audio monitor speaker.... it must* have an internal fuse... You'd think* they'd put it somewhere so its easy to replace.... err.... I can't even find the damn thing so far

Well done with your repairs.... If you happen to pass by this way there is a monitor speaker you can have a play with fixing

I never had Meccano. Maybe that's why I didn't become an engineer.

Traveller in Times giving cheers to the screen mechanic
"I do have old (and new) mecano at hand . . . do not recall using it to fix a desktop computer part however, a ty-rap usually lasts longer then the entire system.

Have been disassembling a cell phone recently, broken screen. Definitely not made to disassemble, most parts were glued with specially shaped two sided sticky tape.

Nice optic foils by the way

Do not know if you still have the broken screen ? Might be very interesting peeling it appart. There will be a hologram of an angled mirror behind it, as well as several polorised foils. optical "

I guess you could just have connected an external monitor to it, via a USB port - provided you don't want to carry it around with you.

We used the old laptop with an attached screen for the last couple of weeks, but it is rather cumbersome.

I did take apart the old screen and was very impressed with the two sheets of prismatic plastic - some sort of "Fresnel prism". I'll have lots of happy hours experimenting with them.

I didn't think to check the other rather dull looking sheets for polarisation and they went into the bin.

Nice one Gnomon. You certainly did better than I did with my old laptop. Mind you, having lent it to friends to help their kids out with homework when their pc broke beyond repair didn't help. It came back minus the lid/screen altogether and the laser head in the dvd player sheared off.
When I asked what happened the response left me somewhat stunned.
the reply was, Quote "no idea what happened, kids are kids, they break things don't they" unquote. No offer to repair/replace, needless to say not only will I not lend anything to them again, they ain't on my xmas card list anymore either.
Fortunately, have a new laptop thanks to a Uni grant, goes without saying, I won't be lending it to anyone, fullstop.

Incredible, that. Present a bill -- they are putting it up to you surely.

Gnomon -- hearty congratulations. That is truly zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance.