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Hey guys,

Have an Acer notebook here that is doing something odd. When it boots up, you can see the screen flash white and then black, and sort of spread to the entire screen over the course of a second or two. Then, it’s just gray. The function keys for brightness work, you can see the screen getting dimmer/brighter, but nothing else.

I connected the laptop to a monitor, and it shows up fine. I took the battery out, re-seated the RAM and CMOS battery, and took the screen out. I re-seated the 40 pin connection on the LCD and I held the power button in for 30 seconds with the battery out of the notebook. Put everything back together, and nothing.

I attached a video of the issue in action. I can easily replace the screen, I just don’t want to if it’s not the true culprit.

9 Spice ups
2

Could be either, but i’d place my money on the Inverter.

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If you hold the laptop up to bright light, can you see a shadow of the display or is it completely dead?

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4

You could try the cable first, sometimes when they get pinched they are easily ruined. But I’d assume the screen is your issue, yeah.

1 Spice up
5

This sounds like bad inverter / backlight, not screen. You can replace backlights, but it’s a PITA. Just buy a replacement inverter and that should take care of it.

3 Spice ups
6

Hmm… sounds like inverter to me too. Can you still see a faint image at all or is it just a solid grey?

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At first I was thinking inverter, too, but would the function keys adjust the brightness if the inverter or backlight was dead? I’m not sure, but I wouldn’t think so.

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8

If it’s malfunctioning this would be expected. The inverter controls the power to that backlight.

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Last time I replaced a backlight it was sort of by accident. It was just a CFL tube in the bottom of the frame around the LCD panels themselves. I had a whole new panel for another laptop that didn’t end up working and it was also a 17" panel. I took it apart and swapped all the light filters and diffusers and LCD panels into the other one and tossed it’s guts away. Plugged it up and luckily it worked. Except I now have a couple specs of dust between the diffusers and I feel that if I took it apart to clean it out, I will probably get more in there.

It’s a pain in the butt especially if you don’t want a permanent dust spec on your screen. Also while I did originally want to swap just the bulbs, I found that the reason my old one quit working was because the bulb was shattered. I didn’t even want to mess with it at that point.

2 Spice ups
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I know it controls power to the backlight… I guess if it’s just malfunctioning and not completely dead that could be the case. Just usually when I see a bad inverter, it’s dead with no voltage output and there’s no backlight at all.

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The screen is lit up and I don’t need to shine light on it to see that, but all I see is a darker 1" square going around the perimeter of the screen and a lighter square within that. Almost seems like there’s some vertical/horizontal lines.

Like I said, the brightness function keys can make the display dimmer or brighter, but there’s no actual image, just a gray screen.

I had wanted to attach a video, but I’m not sure it worked. Can anyone confirm? I can upload to Youtube if it didn’t.

Thank you all for the help so far.

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I’d bet on the panel itself too if the brightness settings still work.

That rules out a backlight problem, I think the inverters are mostly for the backlight and the panel works without them (my old laptop did anyway) too.

Rule of thumb: if you shine a light onto the screen if you can still see stuff faintly, it’s a backlight issue, if you can’t, it’s usually the panel.

2 Spice ups
13

You mentioned you checked the 40 pin going in to the panel but did you check the end going onto the motherboard?

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No video. :frowning:

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I’d bet money that it has nothing to do with the backlight or inverter at that point. Before you rush out to put a new panel I would plug into an external monitor and make sure you have video output still.

It’s possible something is wrong with the graphics processing unit. most of the time that means you might as well throw the whole thing away.

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He said in the OP that an external monitor works fine, so that rules out the GPU. Sounds like it’s most likely the LCD panel, with a chance of Bill’s “malfunctioning but not completely dead” inverter idea.

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all it takes is a solder joint to be fractured.

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Interesting enough, the entire screen has gone ‘white’ now. There’s still dark areas and faint lines.

To confirm, yes, external monitor works fine. Also, the motherboard end of the video connection was solid as well.

The user says that this happened out of the blue and nothing obvious happened to cause it.

Here’s the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTz2LQIF21k&feature=youtu.be

2 Spice ups
19

If your brightness controls are making the gray lighter and darker, that sounds like the backlight is good, but something driving the LCD, or the LCD itself must be the problem. Since the video card is still sending video out the port to an external monitor, that seems to point to the LCD itself. You’re getting the same results with and without Windows involved, right? In other words, if you hit your BIOS key during start up, the screen is still gray?

If the BIOS screen is normal, then it may be possible it’s a Windows video driver issue.

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Whenever this situation comes up. I just replace both. The screen and the inverter. Saves troubleshooting time and down time for the user which will make up the cost when you include those. Problem solved 99.9% of the time. The other .1% the cable is bad.

2 Spice ups