The following was a response to an email asking about lines in the display.
To be straight with you, you may be eventually facing replacement of the screen. However, it may be possible to patch up your laptop to give many more hours of service before you have to do that.
What happens is that when the lid is repeatedly flexed (for instance by tilting it from a corner instead of the middle at the top or both sides at once) some of the extremely fine individual connections for the display can become intermittent or even fail. Failed connections like this will result in a stripe 1 pixel wide or more with no display at all.
I have a commercial client in Merritt Island who has a Dell Inspiron 6000 with a similar problem. In his case the hinges and other hardware in the lid had loosened up a bit and he was losing about the bottom 20% of his display. In his case, it took about an hour to tighten up the display hardware and cable connections. When he boots up that 20% still blanks out, but when he pinches the frame of the display it fills in. I check ebay occaisionally and let him know if I spot a deal on a replacement for his screen. As bad as this laptop was he has continued using it for around 4 months now waiting for a deal on a replacement screen.
In your case, I don’t know the model number of your HP laptop to tell you the cost of a replacement screen, but installation takes around an hour to an hour and a half…same as the time it would take to bolster what you have to get you by for now. My rate is $30/hr which you won’t find at computer or office supply stores that mostly won’t attempt physical repairs on laptops anyway.
When you’re ready to get a new screen, we’ll need to find a replacement and get it ordered. There are far too many to stock except for screen specialists. However prices are reasonable for new screens with prompt delivery from reputable sources. It seldom takes more than 1.5 hours to install.
Please call 321-720-7705 (9am – 9pm) to arrange a time.
