Latitude D820 WUXGA NVidia. LCD Vertical lines. Now Blue garbled screen.

Hi,

I purchased Latitude D820 WUXGA in Feb 2007 with 3 years Warranty. After exactly 3 years and 2 months i.e. Apr 2010, I got 2 vertical lines on my screen. By Sept Oct 2010, I had several vertical lines. In Jan 2011, screen went completely dead i.e. blue and I cannot see anything. See attached pic. I attached external monitor when I had vertical lines and also after I got this blue screen and the display is fine on external monitor.

I know NVidia issues and Dell's extra 1 year warranty. So I called them up and they said, if external monitor shows fine, then its your LCD. Is that correct? The reason I ask is because LCD is connected internally to motherboard i.e. NVIDIA card and I dont know if the VGA input for external monitor is different from the internal NVidia card or if its part of the NVidia Card. Any suggestions.

I can buy new LCD but check this guys problem. He replaced LCD but is seeing same issues again.
Latitude D820 LP154WU1 WUXGA Display Failure - Laptop Video Forum - Laptop - Dell Community

What should I do? I dont want to buy 120 dollar LCD if its not going to work. Can I buy a used WXGA for 20 30 dollars first and see if it will work with my system which was native WUXGA? I read some people saying dont try that as it might make inverter go bad.

 

Correct, it you get artifacts on the external monitor then your GPU/RAM/motherboard is defective. If you don't then your LCD is defective.

 

Did you mean if you *CANNOT* get artifacts on the external monitor then your GPU/RAM/motherboard is defective.

I dont understand what you are trying to convey here. If I dont get display on external monitor, then how is LCD defective?

 

Right. If your GPU/RAM/motherboard was defective then it would display artifacts on the LCD/external monitor regardless. If your computer only artifacts on the LCD but not on an external monitor then your LCD is defective. If you don't get display on an external monitor that could be the port where you are trying to display out is defective. I've seen my good portion of defective VGA/HDMI outputs.

 

Chances are that it's the GPU, I've had similar issues with multiple D620's. Have Dell replace the motherboard and you should be fine.

 

First approach Dell support. If no joy then see this.

John

 

Tsunade_Hime is right. If the laptop displays correctly to an external monitor but the internal screen is borked. Then the internal screen, or the LVDS cable to it is broken.

He even said it shows fine on his external LCD.

Pop the keyboard and check to make sure the LVDS cable is not cut or frayed. If it looks fine, then it's probably the internal screen.

I see the screen and the LVDS cable parts on ebay now and again

 

Ok, the update is I went ahead and ordered new LCD, same resolution etc. After connecting LCD I get blank black screen while system starts i.e. windows bootup and even after I login. I can see the hard disk lights etc and I wait (wait because black screen so cant see anything) till system boots and then type in password and windows plays the start up audio sound. so I connected external monitor and I can see everything fine on external monitor. I use FN F8 on my system to toggle between external monitor vs LCD. I am attaching screenshots of both bad old LCD vs new LCD when I have the external monitor connected to the system.

Since the black screen was annoying, I tried to several things like going to device manger and see if I see any errors etc. I opened the NVidia program to set display settings and there was a preview mode for setting up multiple monitors. The good thing that happened using this is that now external monitor is set as primary and my LCD as secondary so when windows loads, atleast I can see login screen on external monitor.

Anyway, bottom line, new lcd shows black screen. I thought my connections might have been bad so I connected old bad lcd to check if display cable is messed up. It shows the vertical lines or blue ish fuzzy picture which means connection is fine, and display cable is not bad. See attached pictures.

What could be wrong in this case?

 

Have you tried turning up brightness?

If you've checked the cable, then likely you received a defective LCD (not uncommon) and you might have to RMA it.

 

About brightness, I didnt try to up the brightness. But if it was brightness, then I guess the old bad lcd would not have shown that blue fuzzy image correct?

If new lcd is defective then iam in trouble, because this seller needs shipping money as per his ebay terms. shipped from china and its 25 dollars. I hate it. :-(

Tell me one thing. If my bad LCD is showing the blue fuzzy image and external monitor looks fine, can we say for 100% surety that the new lcd is bad? I would hate to get another and find out that it was something else. By looking at the pictures especially bad lcd ones, its obvious right that the old lcd is bad and I need to get a new one. When I say checked the cable, I meant connecting bad LCD back and it showed blue fuzzy screen so I assumed cable is fine. Or do you think I could be wrong here?