Summary

I bought a refurbished Dell Inspiron E1505. After a year and a month it started having problems with the screen. I had to change the inverter to fix the problem since the warranty was gone. I had never dissasembled a laptop myself. This is the story.

Identifying the problem

The screen slowly started to look like this:

After calling Dell, sending them the laptop to repair was out of the question. After googling up I found out the problem could either be a loose connector, the inverter or the backlight. The dell forums were very useful to figure out the problem.

I prayed for a loose connector, but It wasn't to be. I learned how to dissasemble my laptop checking dell support site.

I was left with the backlight or the inverter. There wasn't a way to know this, but to replace the backlight I had to replace the hole LCD screen (in this model the backlight is a chip in the LCD). Buying a new LCD in EBay would cost me around US$ 200. Buying an inverter would cost around US$ 40. Not every inverter works with my LCD so I had to check this before buying it.

Right before deciding what to do, the laptop started to make a buzzing noise and sometimes the screen would go completely black. Sometimes restarting the laptop plugged into an outlet solved the problem. I decided the inverter could be the problem.

Replacing the Inverter

I decided to buy the inverter in EBay, it would be the cheapest try. To dissasemble the laptop I only needed a phillips screwdriver. I had no previous experience dissasembling a laptop, but I had no choice.

Steps

I followed the steps suggested in Dell's documentation site.

1) The first thing to do is to remove the battery from the laptop.

2) Next, remove the hinge cover (see picture), I did this leveraging the right side with my fingers and then lifting it carefully.

3) Once the hinge cover is out, I could access the keyboard screws. I'd recommend removing the keyboard since this allowed me to unplug every one of the screen connectors.

Once the screws are off (2), the keyboard can be removed. To me, this was the trickiest part. I did not know how hard to pull the keyboard, it took me some time to get the courage to pull hard. The keyboard must be lifted like shown in the picture below. Be really careful not to undock any of the keys, they are very very delicate.

After lifting the keyboard, the data bus that must be disconnected. Removing the LCD cable that is underneath the keyboard allowed me to move the LCD freely afterwards. The wireless antena is also visible. The antena, which runs all the way to the top of the LCD cover should not be removed.

4) The next step is to remove the display bezel. I did not separate the display assembly from the laptop to do this.

I started by removing the screw covers (6) like in the following picture