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Replacing a laptop LCD

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daveLovesIt:

--- Quote ---Why don't we leave this as a misread hostility point?

--- End quote ---

I'd very much like to yes =) I suspect we're similar, in that every sentence we read in a post tends to spawn at least ten ideas for a response... before you know it everyone is confused and it comes out like a battle in pedantics; not to mention you forget or overlook things that have been said.... For the sake of avoiding confusion, I'll just avoid quoting three different posters and just use topic headers. mostly for my own benefit.

RAM
Ram issues are about the one thing that a POST can be expected to consistently detect, because its usually among the first things that get tested. Apart from subtle RAM problems, which will allow a boot but then cause errors, you would almost always expect error beeps. So we are agreed, the RAM is not the issue.

POST and the screen
I know your laptop isn't making it to the POST, that's the point! If it was intentional for the system to dissallow a screenless boot, you would expect it to do the self-test, fail, then cut-out, hopefully with an error. This means your problem is not expected by or not handleable by the motherboard (more specifically, its not powering sufficiently to do anything much at all by the sound of it - this is why it was important to assess power/shorting problems - most times I've seen one flick on for no more than a second, this has been the culprit.)

Batteries/Power
A brand-new or mint-condition laptop of any age should be fine from the mains, yes. (I do not know if some brands require the battery to boot by design, though, purely for the purpose of creating a circuit)
The condition of the battery, power-supply and internals as they degrade over time can drastically change the expected behaviour. I'm sure ancient laptops never had the burst issue I mentioned, because they didn't need a lot of power, and it's very likely that modern or more high-end mid-age ones address(ed) this with a capacitance trick to fire it up. I've mainly worked on laptops between about 4-6 years old, and (mostly) cheaper ones, so my experience is probably a bit skewed. I've definitely seen some that worked fine with no battery + mains, but did not work with flat battery + mains. It's still a standard diagnostic to test with a full battery (with and without mains), and also with no battery at all, this I am sure of. Sounds like you should test without the battery, just in case you get a different symptom that might mean something to someone. Probably not, but it only takes a second. You've succesfully charged the battery, so we should be able to rule out a power issue... (unless the new screen is actually sucking far more juice than the laptop you have can provide, but insufficient power is usually accompanied by very slow spinning fans and flickering/dim lights as the thing tries to boot in slow-motion, at least with desktops.)

So what's wrong with it!????
I'd put money on it being the new screen, pretty unfortunate given what you've told me if you somehow managed to break something else simply by handling it, as you haven't really opened it up at all (he finally gets, you say!), and the battery charges okay.
Best case scenario, you need to do something with the extraneous wire or adjust the connector / buy a different adapter piece. Worse cases could be, you jammed a wrong connector into a similar-looking hole, and fried something important or you (your friend?) have splashed out hard cash on an incompatible screen... But I'm 90%+ sure this new screen is causing the cut-out, let's just hope not permanently! Maybe you just need to prise apart the connector a little with screwdriver and it'll slide out. You do seem to think something wasn't right when you first inserted it though.


I could explain why I would drive two knuckles deep into a piece of semi-useful electronics (it was only an Advent) at blinding speed, but It's way off-topic and this post is big enough already. Its one of those "had to be there" things anyway.

fohfoh:
I'm leaning more towards mobo. Something maybe to do with "borking" something when making the fix, so maybe a combination of the screen and the mobo. Even without a screen, it shouldn't turn off. In my experience a computer a Sony laptop turning off is usually only 1 of 3 conditions. 1. Battery is out of power AND there is no AC power available. Even with a dead battery but with AC, it will still not turn off. 2. Power saving mode of some sort. 3. Mobo/something on it has issues and the BIOS (Phoenix) turns things off to try and save your hardware.   

AFAIK, Sony's mobos for laptops don't make noise. Dells do, yes and quite a few others do, but I've never heard any noise from my mobo at all. Seriously. And I've hit certain scenarios several times where if I was on my dell, it'd beep like there's no tomorrow. But on my Sony... "Fuck? I think it's hung up? No indication or noise... don't want to wait..." *Force restart*

It's an oddity, I know.


- I truly don't think it is the RAM. (As stated in my last post, which though full of doubt, did not explicitly say so). But shorting something is still a possibility.
- NOT HDD. Even without HDD, the laptop will boot.
- Video card? I doubt it's that, but it's probable. However, I can't even imagine how you'd mess this part up, so it's on the low possibility side.
- Battery. Now that I think about it... did you ever test with no battery to maybe see if the AC cable is screwed up and you have a dead battery? Also, Sony unlike many other brands has a 2 piece AC power cable. Double check to see if they're not loose.
- Screen. Pretty sure the laptop(s) that I have can run without the screen, but I haven't done proper testing to check. However, if it was indeed the screen's problem due to lack of connection etc. or something, then it's the mobo telling the unit to shut down.
- Screwed something up on the mobo. IMO this is most likely. Or, like the point above, the mobo is turning off because it believes something is wrong.

Something could be wrong and you wouldn't even know it. I mean in all seriousness, my Sony laptop "functioned" with a partially damaged mobo for over 9 months after I purchased it before it totally went to shit and I didn't even know. I found out later that (it was a display model) due to the fact it was on for so long and it was placed in a way where the ventilation was poor, the mobo had partially melted the GPU chip's connectivity which caused me to have a failure of my screen booting up every 1 out of 3 tries or so (Yes I lived with this "issue" for 9 months). It was especially bad due to the fact my laptop was a turbo cache video card based laptop. What the guy told me was that due to it being "loose" and not proper, the mobo was at certain points failing to recognize that the "main" integrated graphics chip was even there. Thus, my laptop was powering up but not doing anything due to the fact it didn't have a method to use the display. (See point 2 about why it's a low possibility)


What to do now?

Back track.

Try to see if you can get the unit back to step 1 by putting the broken screen in and checking things. If it goes back to normal. HEY! It's the shitty screen! Sigh of relief, anger at screen. If not, well... now we know it's not likely anything can be done... Cry tears. It's over and it's a sad day.

daveLovesIt:
I just don't see how the motherboard got damaged in this case if Kira is being honest about everything...

Note that I did mention a improperly installed or incompatible screen may have fried something when first powered on, naturally this would include the motherboard.

I'm starting to build up an inherent distrust of the Sony VAIO range. Seems to me you pay twice as much to have them break twice as often.

Freedom Kira:
Alright, I'm back again. This time with another one.

This time it's an Acer Aspire ZG5 netbook. Same problem, changed the screen out (this time there was no adapter). Now the book doesn't start. There is no reaction whatsoever, not even the power light.

Admittedly there are a few steps I skipped that I shouldn't have. For instance, I forgot to remove the battery before doing anything. I also forgot to check to make sure the thing still started up before changing it. I also may have been more rough than I should have been, but that is subjective.

So it's possible that the battery is out of juice, but usually it should still light up to acknowledge that I tried to start it up. I don't have the charger on hand, so I will have to update about that later.

If anyone's got any experience with this problem, please enlighten me. I swear no one who has changed a laptop screen has ever encountered this problem... at least not on Google... maybe I'm just careless enough to bork two mobos trying to change two LCD screens? I haven't had a single successful change yet >.>

Edit: Plugged in the thing and it works. Whew, I seriously thought I broke something... I would have expected some kind of reaction though, at least an acknowledgement that I pushed the power button, like the power indicator would light up or something. Especially if the battery still had juice only 2-3 weeks ago. Or are Acer batteries that bad?

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