Taking small break on bible places and things in Israel, skip this if you are not interested 🙂

I fix laptops for people, as for some reason I like repairing them, and people have given me donations towards my volunteering work here.

• Saves you buying a new computer! well yeah, er of course 🙂
• You feel like a boss after fixing your computer, and feel and extreme sense of satisfaction of doing it yourself!
• Stick your tongue out at the iPad crowd, as laptops are still way better than tablet computers, you can type on them, and angle the screen to a comfortable setting and are the best device for real work on the move.  🙂

Rather than throw it away when it gets a fault, if you have steady hands and the right tools, it can be revived again, give this a go!

You need, small philips screwdriver, spludger or some suitable plastic prising device like a guitar plectrum, a bowl or something to put the screws in safe.  Also have another working computer on your desk to follow these instructions and the helpful Youtube videos.

One of the leaders of my bible study had this quite popular Samsung NC-10 mini laptop, the problem with it is the screen on it disappears into a white background or flashes white lines on it, by adjusting the screen you can fix or make this worse.

It seems to be a popular problem, its caused by the cable that connects the screen panel to the motherboard going bad, it seems a poor design in this computer means the wires get pinched by the screen hinges.

If you do some Google searches you can see this model laptop suffers from this issue a lot.  I tracked down the part and read up how it dismantles and decided to try and see if I could fix it.

I bought a replacement genuine Samsung part from eBay.    Like all screen cables for laptops, its got a flat rectangular end and its thin in the middle and has another small rectangular end that plugs into the motherboard with an extra cable for grounding that is fixed by one philips screw.   This part cost me US$17 including shipping from China which took two weeks to get here.  You can buy this part from sellers from UK and US at a higher price too.

The sellers do not usually provide any help on fitting or how to do a repair.

 
I didn’t take much pictures of the work I did, regrettably, but check out these Youtube videos, someone has kindly made available that show a tear-down of this model computer.  Its actually quite easy to take apart, although fitting the cable is quite tricky, as it has to be routed in the exactly the right place through the hinges.

It seems if you take the laptop apart and make sure all the connections are in tight some people say this will fix it but then the problem may come back again a bit later.   Therefore I thought it would be best to replace the LCD cable.    Take attention to where the cables sits underneath the LCD panel other the screen will look wonky and this might pinch your new cable again.

One you have both sections of the NC-10 apart, you need to remove one more philips screw where the cable attaches to the board, give it a gentle wiggle for the cable to come free.   To remove it from the screen end, there is a piece of yellow tape to removed which you should keep safe or replace when you reassemble it.

The rounded chrome coloured screen hinge that houses the troublesome cable is made of two pieces and very gently with screwdriver you can prise it apart and get at the cable.   The tricky thing is that the centre of the cable is wrapped around the hinge along with the cable for the screen mounted web cam.  These have to go in a very specific way, so take a picture with a camera that can do close up pictures, so after you remove the bad cable you know how to fit the new one.

Once this is done, you can put refit the LCD panel in the screen lid and put in the bottom screws and loosely reassemble the laptop and see if the screen lights up, whilst holding F1 to go into the BIOS screen to prevent it from booting into Windows.   If all is well, you put it back together and enjoy your newly fixed Samsung!

If this has been useful to you, and you mended your own computer, please consider giving me a donation to the work I am doing providing volunteer IT support to a Christian charity in Israel.