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Ok, I am the family tech guru, so my extended family brings all their crap for me to fix for free.

My aunt brings me her laptop, which had been run over by a car and the lcd was completely shattered. However, the external VGA port worked for viewing on an external monitor.

She wanted me to load windows XP on the laptop, which was not easy since it has an SATA harddrive, but I managed to make it work.

I was feeling generous and found a good deal on a replacement screen on ebay, and I bought it. I installed the new lcd and it was working like a champ.

I spent the next several hours hunting down the right XP drivers for her machine and installing windows updates and the like. I had pretty much resurrected the machine when out of the blue I get a BSOD. When I rebooted the machine, nothing on the screen at all. No POST message, nothing. the lighs come on, fan comes on, hard drive spins, cd rom seems to be spinning. My first assumption was that the screen just died after all, it was a used screen off ebay, but now I can't even get the external monitor to work.

Any ideas how I can verify that the problem is my screen and not my processor, motherboard, etc...

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by BILL S
Member Avatar for BILL S

I've worked on a few Dell Latitudes, disassembling the LCDs in fact, it's one of the most challenging things to repair and do correctly. The lamps for example must be the right size to fit, and the re-assembled without further damage. I can replace inverters and hinges. I have replaced flex cable as well. If the glass front is broken, it maybe the only issue, but not likely when you sit on them or a car drove over it, typically the fluid internally leaks and cannot be fixed or remedied. The panels could in theory be replaced if complete, and I've got parts from the Latitudes aside from the glass, since I can't get those seperate parts from anyone I know, you'll be left buying an LCD and assembling the outward shell. You can score a bargain, but you can't do much more then that given the abundance of parted FULL LCDs, just make sure you can live with any issues they possess.

From having replaced that, and you lost the VGA video, I would assume the XP install is in error, a BSOD does not indicate a bad LCD, but a software related or hardware issue directly related to software. Did you try a boot without Windows for example and there's no video? If so, then the hardware itself is causing a problem. Could be the video card if more then the computer's display was harmed

Edited by BILL S because: additional info.
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