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So, what does a 2011 Dell Inspiron 15 and a 2010 Toshiba Satellite L655-S5072 laptop have in common? Well apparently, they both use the same LCD panel.

It's been a long time since I replaced an LCD in a laptop. I don't do this for clients - I send them to a Mom & Pop shop that does that kind of work. I will, however, do it for myself, or when someone gives me a damaged laptop and I try to fix it to give it away to someone who needs one (my "charity" pile).

So someone gave me a 2011 Dell Inspiron 15 the other day with a broken screen. How did the screen break? She drove over the laptop bag with her car (no kidding). Amazingly the laptop survived quite well with the only damage a cracked LCD panel. She went ahead and bought a new laptop and after I migrated her data, she gave me the old one to sanitize the drive and do with as I pleased.

Looked around online and found a replacement for 55 bucks, but I really didn't want to spend the money and maybe discover the panel didn't work or had a bunch of bad pixels, so I was going to toss the Dell onto my junk pile and maybe offer it to someone who might be willing to fix it themselves.

ALSO sitting on my junk pile was this Toshiba laptop someone gave me several months ago, that had a dead mobo. It was from the same era (2010), with the same specs (1st Gen Core i3, 15" display, etc). Then I remembered when I looked up the replacement panel for the Dell online that the same panel was a generic replacement for a variety of laptops including Toshibas. So I decided "what the hell", and pulled the LCD out of the Toshiba.

First off, modern LED back-lit LCDs are a frigging marvel of science. They are nearly as thin as a plate glass window. Without the need for an inverter for the old fluorescent backlights, they are very simple in design, with only one connector. They all, apparently now use a standard connector which is a big change from the old days when every manufacturer (and even every model of the same manufacturer) had a unique custom ribbon connector on the LCD that didn't fit anything else.

Mounting holes are also located in the same places. Seems like everything about modern LCD panels are completely standardized. I did a little research and found that the reason for this is cost cutting.

Laptop manufacturers want standardized LCDs and will order different LCD panels from different suppliers depending on the price, which varies. LCD panels are now as much a commodity as RAM and hard drives, and like those two items, they are completely interchangeable in the same size range. So just like you may open two identical laptops of the same model and manufacturer, and find two different brands of hard drives and RAM, you may also find two different brands of LCD panels.

Needless to say, the Toshiba LCD panel, despite not being from the same LCD manufacturer, or having the same model number, fit perfectly in the Dell, and works like a champ.

Oh how I wish I could say the same thing for a Sony laptop that I tried to resurrect a few years back. I ordered two different screens and even though they were from the same series and even bolted in the same way, they had just slightly different connectors. One of them even had the same model number. I really hope what you say is true. Oddly, I have had fewer and fewer broken screened laptops come my way in the last few years.

One connector eh? That could prove useful for other applications.. It would be interesting if there was a way to connect it to s car stereo or some other non-pc video source and install them into very tight spaces...

eGo

http://youtu.be/r0IiXl88Sfw

The standard is called LVDS. You need a controller for it that is usually located on the laptop mobo. There does seem to be a standard connector some manufacturers use.

Enough of a standard that this guy demos an interface card for his Raspberry Pi.

The panel in that video looks just like the one I used.

I may have to look into this Raspberry Pi thing.. I can think of a couple of cool things to do with LCD panels like this..

eGo

I emailed my friend who is chief engineer at my old company, a year ago, about the Raspberry Pi, and suggested he have his R&D dept look at it for use in video playback kiosks.

One of the things they do is supply video playback kiosks at horse & dog tracks so you can watch any previous race for the past few years.

The way we used to do it when I was there in 1996 was to have a dedicated PC for each kiosk - running Win95 - with an MPEG1 video playback card with composite video out (CPUs were not fast enough to decode full screen MPEG1 video back then). They all pulled the videos from a Linux file server, and we used a Windows NT Workstation with an MPEG1 encoder card (again, not enough CPU power to do it in sofdtware) to record the races.

No networking, the Win95 PCs all sat in a rack and a video cable and serial twisted pair (for a keypad) went to each kiosk containing a 19" TV set.

Nowadays they use networked systems, and thankfully you don't need dedicated video hardware for playback or recording, but they're still using dedicated Windows PCs in each kiosk. That adds up when you multiply a dozen or so kiosks at each race track, and several race tracks around the country, and you need to keep spares and deal with all the usual Windows headaches.

When I read a Raspberry Pi could run HTPC software, I thought that if I was still working for that company, I'd look into using them for the Kiosks. Write some custom software and put it on a USB stick, and they'll probably run forever without a problem.

HEH... just for fun did a quick search of my photo archive and found this photo of the 2nd gen prototype of our race replay system around 1999 when I left the company. This was running on a bunch of Win98 machines and a WinNT server with a hideously expensive (something like $5000) MPEG2 encoder board to capture the race videos from BetaCam tapes and convert them to MPEG2 files to store on the server.

The keypad on the left is the keypad you would have in the kiosk. It was a military grade all-metal phone keypad (looked like it came off a pay phone). Customers tended to abuse the hell out of these machines, and anything less than that just wouldn't hold up. No touch screens back then (well there were - on CRTs - but they weren't cost-effective).

We used off-the shelf beige boxes for the prototype, but the final version would have had rack-mounted PCs.

Oh crap, this is turning into a nostalgia trip. Here's my workstation - photo taken the same day. My station is to one on the right with the sexy maroon wrist and mouse pads

Funny story - that PC actually belonged to me personally. The company refused to buy me one to the specs I wanted (they wanted to give me some hand-me down Win95 box), so I paid for and built my own, and took it with me when I left. If memory serves it was a Pentium III Zeon 800 MHz - pretty high end for that time - everyone else had a Pentium or Pentium II. Mine was running WinNT Workstation. My own monitor too - notice mine is bigger than everyone else's?

I was chief audio engineer at that company 9 years, but since I was the only one who knew anything about computers (until we actually started hiring IT staff towards the end) I was the one who usually fixed any of the growing number of PCs we were using for TV broadcasting, editing, the playback kiosks, photo finish and teletiming.

Originally all this was out-sourced, but if I was already at the race track working the sound board, and a critical PC went down (like, say, the main video switcher) then it was quicker to have me look at it than wait for a service call, or a replacement unit from the main office.

After a few years of wearing two hats, I was moved to the main office to join a couple of other two-hatters over there (most of them video engineers who were PC hobbyists) and helped start our company's own IT dept.



The drive above the floppy drive, BTW, was a Syquest cartridge drive. I used them for backups and to transfer data between my home and work PCs. Remember, no flash drives back then, and floppies were only 1.44MB. Sure, you could burn data to CD *IF* you had a burner (they were so pricey that everyone shared a burner on one workstation in my office at that time), *IF* you didn't mind waiting 20 minutes to burn the CD and *IF* you didn't mind that 40% of the time you'd get a bad burn and have to do it again.

CD burners sucked so bad back then they were virtuously useless as far as I was concerned.

A lot of people used Zip drives back then, which stored 100MB, but I didn't like them: they were slow and prone to data errors. The Syquest drives were much faster, and twice the storage. Trouble is the cartridges were more delicate. You could toss a Zip drive disk around like a floppy. Not so the Syquest.

Bummer you did not do a video on performing the LCD change.

Oh there's LOT's of good videos around. Just search on youtube for a laptop model and "LCD replacement". Most of the online LCD parts vendors post instruction videos on Youtube.

I read the Dell service manual first, which would have had me completely disassemble the laptop to replace the screen, which is NOT necessary on most modern laptops. The LCD parts sites all say it's a simple 20 minute job, so I watched one of their videos and it really is simple. You could probably do it in 10 minutes if you did it all the time.

This is is the video I watched, and is really was that simple.

I can't understand why the guy in the video used such a long screwdriver. Those are jeweler size screws.

<object width="640" height="360"><param name="movie" value="//www.youtube.com/v/yTuryp1N7zg?version=3 ... ram><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="//www.youtube.com/v/yTuryp1N7zg?version=3&hl=en_US&rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="640" height="360" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"></embed></object>

I've done similar as well. Most are interchangeable provided they are the same size. In some cases they are not though. Keep in mind, though the screen may be interchangeable, the hinges might not be.

I switched two Toshibas out, one newer Glossy one that was cracked, with an older Matte one a few years older that someone threw out. I knew someone who worked as a trash collector and he got stuff like this. Got a PS3 with a bad Blu-ray drive too. You'd be amazed what people in rich neighborhoods throw out. like some 32"+ LCD TVs with nothing wrong with them.