Well, BUGGER.

[annathepiper]

So, I went up on compaq.com and discovered that they do in fact have a manual that talks about how to do things like take your display panel off your laptop, which I have successfully done; the thing is lying in pieces beside me right now. However, that only served to demonstrate to me and Dar that the suspect hinge is in fact cracked, and neither of us could figure out any obvious way to fix it.

So I called Compaq, and they pointed me at an authorized reseller who wants to charge me $950 for a new display panel. This is, I must note, a thousand dollars less than what the service center in L.A. wanted to charge me, but still. Fuck that.

I am now registered on eBay so I can see if I can buy a busted laptop for parts. There is in fact a guy trying to sell his Presario for parts up there, but according to the auction description the unit has no video, either with or without an external monitor, but he's unclear as to whether the video problem is the fault of the video card or the actual display panel. He's asking $200 for the thing; we'll see if I get an answer out of the email I've sent to him to ask him about it.

Comments

Yuck

[kirbyk.livejournal.com]

In the distant year 2000, when the future was bright, I was a co-founder of Tuxtops, a Linux on Laptops company. What fun!

One of our initial models (the 982, I think made by Uniwill but it might have been Compal*) had this problem. After our second complaint, we took one apart, and discovered that not only did it have only two hinges (most have three), but most of the stress was on one of them to boot. It seemed to take about three months for the average user to see the stress crack developing.

We managed to talk our importer into giving us replacement parts, and gave them to our customers for no charge on that model. (We also stopped selling it as soon as we figured it out, but even the small early sales were a neverending support nightmare.) It's really terrible that Compaq doesn't do this - at least for some models, it's a design flaw.

Nevertheless, yeah, I wouldn't spend too much fixing it. Unless it's very new, the nature of laptops means that it's easy for it to be cheaper to replace one than to fix one. Le suck.

* Side-note: with a very few exceptions, all the laptops in the world are made by a handful of companies in Taiwan. The biggest manufacturer in the world is Compal, with Uniwill and Asus other big names. Almost nobody has heard of them. That's why you can find off-brand laptops that look identical to Dells and Gateways - they _are_. We sold the Dell Inspiron 5000, under a different name. The only difference, other than nameplates, is that big companies get first crack at new technologies, like the XGA screens in mid-2000, and it takes some time for supplies to exist to two-bit operations. Now, some laptop models are awful (like the cracking 982), and some are wonderful (like the Inspiron, actually the Compal 30w), and some companies watch which models they carry more closely than others - but the moral is, if you find a laptop you like, and see what looks like an off-brand knockoff, it's probably the same thing and a better deal. More than you wanted to know about the laptop industry!

Re: Yuck

[annathepiper]

*giggle* Thank you for your enlightening essay. ;D *LOL!* Actually, it was very enlightening.

Though as it happens it was very easy to get the display panel off, and the guy selling his model for parts on eBay did get back to me, and I may go ahead and do that. Because not only would I get the display panel, I'd also get a bigger hard drive and a DVD-ROM drive to use on my box. Not bad for $200, sez I. :)