Powerbook lcd inverter “repair”
The other night, lor and I settled in for our usual evening routine, with her and Mamas on the couch, me in “my chair”, and the hope for something decent on Discovery or History Channel. I had had a melody in my head all day, and decided to go grab the venerable powerbook (667 mhz DVI) and start transcribing before I fell asleep and lost the tune. I toted it and the power adapter down to the living room, plugged it in, opened the lid and found a blank screen. This was fairly typical, as recently my powerbook has taken to shutting itself down spontaneously while asleep. No big deal. I powered it on and went to make some tea. When I returned, the screen was once again blank, even though I had distinctly heard the startup chime.
I put my ear to the keyboard and heard the whir of the internal components. At this point, I also noticed that the screen was actually displaying my desktop, but that the backlight was not on. Thinking that the brightness had somehow gotten cranked all the way down, I tried the brightness function keys, to no avail. The screen remained unlit.
At this point, I went through the usual reboot, reset display (startup holding ‘R’), reset PMU, etc., etc. Again, all to no avail. I began to get a little worried. But, never fear, I thought, surely someone else has had this problem, and thus google knows the answer.
Indeed, I found lots of helpful articles which eventually led me to suspect that the power inverter board had probably gone bad. I found several online stores that sell replacement boards, and was prepared to buy one, since my AppleCare has expired.
Being the nerd that I am, though, I decided to at least try to take the thing apart and see if there was anything obviously wrong with the board or the connections to/from it. So, I broke out my torx size 8, and removed the powerbook’s back cover. The inverter board is located near the front, right corner, outboard of the optical drive. It had two main connections, one of those flat, orange connectors, and another white plastic push-in connector with two wires, one pink and one blue, running from it to somewhere in the more hidden guts of the powerbook.
Someone, somewhere (My apologies for not being able to find the link again!) in the comments of one of the million articles I found on Google mentioned cleaning the contacts of these connections. This sounded like the least dangerous thing I could do. So, I got some tissues, cotton swaps, and alcohol based cleaner, and disconnected the two leads. I dabbed them with the damp swab, and then dried them with a tissue. After reassembling everything, with fingers crossed, and prayers said, I booted it up and waited.
After what seemed like an unusually long wait, the screen came on, and the familiar grey and white apple startup screen appeared … lit brightly, to my relief. So, you have similar problems, you may want to take the 20 minutes to try cleaning your inverter board’s connections to see if that helps.
1 comment:
Definitely try it, and even try buying one of the inverter boards from pbparts or smalldog. Should be pretty easy to replace yourself, and is less than half that outrageous repair cost!
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