Ever switched on your laptop and thought; Hey there’s nothing coming on the screen, only to notice as you move it towards you for a better look, the light catches the screen at a different angle and there’s a very faint/dark image displayed?  In every laptop lcd screen there’s a flourescent tube that illuminates the screen from the back (hence the term backlight) if this fails or the mechanism that starts it up fails then your display will become dark/dim to the point of being unreadable.

In our experience; in most cases it’s not the backlight (the ccfl tube) that fails, but the circuitry that starts it up called the inverter, a small circuitboard that usually resides just below the lcd panel within the screen lid.   As long as the particular inverter is readily available as a spare part then the repair is quite straightforward and simple, swap out the old for the new and it should be as good as new.

 Sometime the backlight itself fails, the ‘symtoms’ are the same, dark screen, faint image etc.  The repair is a little more fiddly as lcd screens are not meant to be taken apart, so changing a ccfl tube is not for the light hearted.  Of course you could always change the lcd panel, but that seems like hitting a nut with a sledgehammer to break it, it’ll also cost you, lcd panels are not cheap.  There are companies that do swap out just the ccfl tube, if your in the UK try us at www.laptop-repairservice.co.uk, else have a search on google for ‘laptop backlight repair’.

 In either case if it happens to you and you just can’t give up the laptop for repair even for a few days, and you have a spare pc monitor to hand, you should be able to plug the monitor cable into the laptop and use it with that, not exactly portable but it should get you out of trouble, and allow you to finish that piece of work with the looming deadline.