I seem to have bad luck with computers and Anthrocon. Last year my Vaio’s display crapped out at Anthrocon; last night the backlight on my Compaq Presario died, leaving the screen extremely dimly lit and the bottom left of the display dim to the point of illegibility. Takaza (who is the best husband in the whole wide world, I’d like to point out) braved the HP/Compaq tech support phone slalom last night and got them to admit that yes, it’s the backlight and yes, it will have to be sent in for repairs. The stupid thing is only six months old, for chrissake! Fortunately, while inconvenient, it’s not crippling for the work I have to do at Anthrocon. Linnaeus has been kind enough to offer the use of his laptop (identical to mine, but one model up) for the con, which will be a godsend. For now, I’m making do with one of Paul’s old monitors he had lying around hooked up to the display output. The laptop will get sent off sometime next week, I expect, once I figure out how to back up everything on it.
In other news, I have a job interview in two hours. Yay! More on that later today…
I suspect from the problems you indicated, it’s the inverter not the actual bulb that’s gone bad. Try gently pressing on the right and left edges of the screen in case it’s just a loose wire. (If it ever happens out of warranty, I can fix backlights for you.)
Good luck on the interview!
I was gonna say make sure to have the computer set to turn the backlight off when it’s not in use; they do have a limited lifetime…but that should be at least 10,000 hours.
Ugh, so maybe it’s the inverter. I can’t wait until they start using strips of white LEDs.
Good luck on that job interview this afternoon, though!
Im pretty sure it would be possible to use white LED’s currently.
If you get the tiny tiny (smaller than rice sized) ones, and glue them to a thin strip of plastic, and then hook them together with fine wire. I think you could honestly replace a cold cathode tube.
Unfortunately, it appears that it’s definitely the backlight. I may be looking into a cheap external hard drive when we get back from Anthrocon to back everything up, then we’ll be sending the unit off to HP/Compaq. Maybe I can get them to fix the annoying buzzing fan as well…
External IDE cases are cheap, and you can put in a full-sized drive which won’t cost as much as a laptop drive.
http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=F-EN5AU2-N1-01&cpc=SCH&srm=0
This site usually has good harddrive deals…
http://www.hot-deals.org/
Good luck on the interview…talk to you tomorrow. 🙂
Glad to hear you have a solution running. It makes me happy to see furs helping furs.
Best of luck with the interview 🙂 Impress em good.