A few weeks ago my old Thinkpad 600E met with an unfortunate accident, which I won't go into, and lost its LCD screen and CD-Rom drive.
For a few days, I wrote off the laptop totally as a lost cause. Then a brand new battery arrived in the post, which I had ordered before the laptop got broken. The old battery had a habit of getting down to 60% then running out of power.
Having spent this money on a new battery, and not wanting to have to send it back to Germany, where it was dispatched from, I decided to risk throwing good money after bad, and replace all the faulty parts. I opted to buy a new LCD panel, that is the display itself, not including the frame. Instead of getting another CD-Rom drive, I was lucky to find for the same price a DVD-Rom, CD-Recordable combo drive.
These parts only took a couple of days to arrive, but I waited for a Sunday afternoon when I was not busy to try and install them.
The LCD frame came apart with a little persuasion, and removing 6 screws, hidden behind little plastic circular pads. It was only connected in two places, a white plug for power, I think, and a thin flat ribbon cable for data. The new LCD display fitted snuggly in place, and much to my surprise, worked first go. The only difficulty in putting it back together was aligning the external brightness slider with its corresponding internal slider. I gave up on this and just put the frame back together, and by some miracle, in doing this the slider lined up and started working.
A much easier job was putting in the new DVD-Rom drive, which was simply a matter of pushing the catch and sliding the old drive out, and the new one in.
Finally, I put the new battery in, and set it charging for a few hours.
Thanks to an 'ahem' accident, the laptop now has a recordable drive, a new display (with only one hard to spot duff pixel), and a battery life of over two hours rather than 45 minutes. A saying that I will stick to in this case is: you never appreciate what you have, until you've broken it, and then had to fix it.
