Repair LCD screen with water damage

Sept. 29, 2009 - PRLog -- Warning: the LCD screen can be easily damaged if you open it up. If you do something wrong the screen might become completely unusable and you’ll have to buy a new screen. It’s very expensive. Think twice before you decide opening the screen. Continue at your own risk.

Here’s my Dell Latitude D610 notebook with water damaged screen I’m going to fix.

First of all remove the battery from the notebook.To fix the problems I had to open up the LCD screen.Lift up rubber screw seals and remove all screws.Carefully separate the screen bezel from the LCD cover and remove the bezel.Remove two screws from the front and two screws from both sides.

Carefully remove the LCD screen from the cover and place it on the notebook base. Disconnect the video cable and the inverter board cable.On this model the inverter board is attached to the screen with two screws. Remove both screws, disconnect the screen cable and remove the inverter board.Carefully peel off sticky tape and foil and put it aside. You’ll have to put it back in place during the screen reassembly.Remove two screws from both sides of the screen.

Carefully place the screen upside down on a flat surface. Carefully unglue the film that covers the circuit board and remove two screws from the board (top circles). I wasn’t really sure if I have to remove screws on the bottom, so I removed them just in case. Do not touch the circuit board with fingers.

http://www.sunvalleyus.com/LCDPanel/

After both screws are removed you should be able to lift up the circuit board. Be careful, it’s still attached to the LCD.Start unsnapping the metal frame from the screen. There are a lot of latches on all sides of the screen. You can unlock them with nails or a small flathead screwdriver.After all latches are opened you should be able to separate the screen into three pieces: metal frame, LCD and background.

If you have lint or dust inside the screen, probably you’ll find it between the LCD and the background. Do not touch LCD or background with your fingers. I was able to remove dust and lint up with a very soft cloth, barely touching the LCD and background surfaces.After I split the screen I found that the background has a few some kind of optical layers (three transparent sheets) and in my case they were damaged by water. The water dried out and left stains between these optical layers.In my case removing dust and lint wasn’t enough and I had to go further.Very carefully separate the LCD with attached circuit board from the background.To remove damaged optical layers it’s necessary to remove metal locks on both sides of the screen. It’s like a small clip that keeps layers in place.

http://www.sunvalleyus.com

After I removed both clips, I was able to look between the layers. At first I tried to clean up the dried water marks with a soft cloth but it didn’t help. The stains were still visible and didn’t want to go away.Fortunately I had another similar screen laying around, it had a cracked LCD. I decided to borrow the optical layers from the cracked screen and transfer them to my screen. I wasn’t sure if it’s going to work, but as I mentioned before I didn’t really care if I break the screen. It was just an experiment.So I disassembled the cracked screen and carefully transfered the white background and all transparent layers to my screen.After that I assembled my screen back removing dust and lint with a very soft cloth. Breathlessly connected my new screen to the notebook. Turned it on and…

http://www.sunvalleyus.com/Mobile-Phone-Accessories/

No dust, no lint, no water mars inside the screen! It’s clear and the background is absolutely clean!