I have 2 laptops. One, x41 IBM is old enough to have its screen suffer from the lamp degradation. Another one is IBM x61 wich screen recently has been cracked a bit. Across, to be specific. Both have the screen dimention in common, so our schedule today are:
- replace screen on x61
- extract the lamp, which is still pretty bright from the broken screen
- replace the old lamp from the screen of x41 with that one from x61.
I didn’t want to replace the whole screen of x41 because a) I am quite a stingy person, b) I like to pretend that I am here to save the world (in this particular case by limiting wastage) and c) why on earth I have to buy a new screen anyway if the only thing I need is a lamp? (And, logically, why the hell I have to buy a new lamp, which is sure quite inexpensive, when I have a decent lamp in the broken screen?) I can’t figure out which of the arguments was most important to me.
So, first the screen has been ordered on ebay: it is easy to find one for almost any contemporary laptop. It took 1 week to get it to Cyprus. Now we have excellent instructions here and here. So, if you have decent hammer and saw, you are done. Almost.
I decided to make further notes on the photos I took during the work (here).
After replacement of the lamp two noticable bright spots appeared at the bottom of the screen, where the lamp resides. I’ll try to fix it a bit later, since it annoys me very little.



