Fixing stuff #4

Well, I thought I'd give you an update on my "Fixing Stuff" blips.

Well, there's good news and bad news and some progress.

The first good one...the Dell service engineer came yesterday and swapped the keyboard on my laptop. And low and behold - my laptop lives again! It was surprising that a simple duff keyboard was completely stopping my laptop from booting.

But then...today I changed the part on the monitor amp that I thought was knackered and put it all back together. I then powered it on (I always stand back at this point). All I got was a "BIG BANG". Eeek! Powered it off, and had a closer look, and one of the capacitors had blown up completely. I looked over the power supply section, and could see quite a few capacitors gone (you can tell as the top bulges when they are knackered.

So I've ordered a few more components to try to get that fixed.

Lastly - some good progress on the laptop. I didn't know if it was the LCD panel (expensive) or inverter (not so expensive). Well, I picked up a "Modding Kit" which has some nice lighting for the inside of your PC. This uses the same technology as an LCD backlight (see photo)

So I "hotwired" the inverter from the modding kit into the LCD panel...and low and behold...the backlight works. So know I just need to trace down a replacement inverter...But nowhere seems to have them :(. But I did find a universal one, that with a bit of hacking and rewiring should work nicely.

I do like hardware hacking - its quite a big scene, wiring stuff together that was never meant to be.

Have a look here and here for more info.