laptop screen: black band

Raam

I just installed the firefox 1.0.1 update on my acer aspire 1681 laptop, placed it on the carpet and left the room. When I came back, the screen had a black band about 4 inches thick, running the entire length of the screen (top to bottom) and about 3 inches in. It won't go away and is present even when I am booting up the laptop. What on earth have I done? I didn't drop it or spill anything on it. I'm off to search the web to see what is going wrong. If anyone has any good suggestions as to how to fix it myself, then let's hear em

Basq

Jesus... that is weird!

No suggestions here i'm afraid!

Will look up some info on it too, and let you know if i find anything

jetsonx

Sounds like someone tripped on your acer or gave it a hefty kick...

Disconnect the bluewire from your desktop monitor....stick it in your monitor...see what happens

Basq

Found this here!

Hope this isn't the case but seems fairly likely:

Even though both types uses similar transistors as a backlit LCD shutters, they work and arranged differently. DSTN laptop screens have one transistor per each row. The sign of irreparable damage of DSTN displays could be a solid black line (or many lines) going in vertical or horizontal directions. That is caused by failed transistor inside the matrix. There is nothing you can do to fix this thing. Try to avoid it. Active matrix laptop screens are comprised of many and many thousands and even of several million of individual transistors, each and every pixel is controlled by one to four transistors, therefore damaging one of them would not bring such devastating consequences. You would be looking at screen with randomly scattered sparkles, which not necessary be black. If you are not intended to be in Christmas mood all year round - keep off such otherwise entertaining thing.

EDIT: This appears to be the case in DSTN screens, but not in TFT.

Raam

jetsonx wrote:

Sounds like someone tripped on your acer or gave it a hefty kick...

Disconnect the bluewire from your desktop monitor....stick it in your monitor...see what happens

Hi Jetson/Basquille, nobody touched it. It only happened 10 minutes ago and I'm the only one here! I tried connecting it to the desktop monitor but nothing would come on, then after reading your post I tried it again. The desktop monitor looked fine, but now the band on the laptop was blue! I went to the display settings and changed the resolution. The band "fuzzed" a bit. I changed the res back to what it was and the screen returned to normal! The place where the band was, was fuzzy for a second. Then I rebooted and it appeared again. I repeated the above actions and it went back to normal, but it keeps going funny every few minutes and then going back to normal. Something is screwed in it and I will probably have to send it back. Thanks for the fast replies!

EDIT: screen is TFT

RicardoSmith

jetsonx wrote:

Disconnect the bluewire from your desktop monitor....stick it in your monitor...see what happens

Why just the one wire? Why not all of the wires in the VGA cable?

Raam

just to let those who are interested know...

rang up the website from which the laptop was purchased. Told them the problem. They told me to package up the laptop (leaving the battery in it, but to include nothing else). They then gave me their account number with a courier who will collect it and bring it back to them for repair. This should take 5 -10 working days. I'll let y'all know how I get on

KR