Asus G50vt: OLED screen died.

tl;dr: My OLED screen died on my modded G50vt. I'm abroad. I have insurance but no warranty. How easy is it to have it fixed?

So I'm studying abroad at the moment until June, lugging my trusty G50vt across Europe on a two week trip, and halfway through my OLED screen starts to fade out from left to right, and half the pixels go out. And now it's dead. How easy is it to replace?

Fuller description of problem:
The screen lost half its pixels in a dithering pattern, so every other pixel was suddenly out. This resulted in a still-readable display, but at the same time I had a "dying pixel gradient" from right to left. I'm not sure how to accurately describe this so here's my LCDHype output with a gradient layer to demonstrate:

View attachment output.bmp

So think of that (with every other pixel out, I don't know enough PS to do that quickly), and over the course of two days, that gradient worked itself from left to right, killing the screen slowly before it died for good.

I've taken apart the laptop down to the screen and the connections are still good. LCDHype still detects the screen. It won't function in any OS I use, etc etc-- I think it's dead.

How easy is it to fix this? I have insurance that I'd like to use... does Asus still do RMAs for modded laptops?

I've been so used to an OLED screen and it's so hard to function on my laptop without the time/temp/battery life all right there at a glance.

 

well if you are handy enough you could buy and replace the little dot matrix screen.. but that would be enough work sourcing the materials, installing, trouibleshooting, and is likely not worth it for a battery meter / clock / temp (things you can put in your taskbar).

even claiming insurance or sending it back to ASUS would probobly not be really worth it. It could take them a month...

The real problem is you need a board of the exact dimensions / number of led lights. That would take a lot of time.

I think sometimes you jut need to learn to adapt, because the alternative is so expensive or time consuming that it's simply not worth it.

 

Hey thanks for the reply! The screen is actually a 256x32px AMOLED screen, not an array of individually soldered LEDs.

I've considered it not being worth it; I don't know if I could do a month without a laptop, as I'll be doing software and stuff over the summer (and I'm in school for EE). But I'll see how it turns out. I still wonder whether Asus would RMA such a modded laptop. I mean, I have superglue and Gorilla Tape holding my screen in place to the brackets. No joke. Works great.

As for being spoiled, I'm coping lol. The taskbar icons are fine and dandy for normal work, but in-game having the time/GPU temp right there is a nice addition that I miss.

I don't think it's the premise of not having those conveniences, it's the idea that my laptop feels broken. It's like having the tachometer on your car ripped out. You didn't need it, you can still kind of guess how hard your car is running, but now there's a hole in the dash where it was before.

 

Yeah, I can feel that. On my last laptop I has a number of things that made me so mad every time I looked at them (small crack in the screen bezel, black scratch on my matte LCD screen, and much latter, a COFFEE stain on my LCD screen... that last one was the beginning of the end ). But in the end it really didn't make sense for me to replace the screen or the bezel.

I had a look at this site

http://estore.asus.com/shop/category.asp?catid=606

- could not find anything resembling your AMOLED screen. Since you have modded your laptop (like I have) and warranty is not an option, I think all you can really do is buy the part yourself.

Depending on where you are in the world, it might be easy for you to find someone who could track one down (if you speak the language, and are in Asia).

Once again, it's not so much the money, it's the time. But I really hope you can figure out something that works for you!

Have you bumped your laptop at all recently? Maybe the part is loose... if you were to open it up and see, maybe you could tighten it up and fix it. Hopefully! Doubtful though. ASUS makes great value laptops, but they tend to buy from the lowest bidder when it comes to things like this... Which is why I suspect they ditched the OLED on the newer G series laptops.

On the bright side... you now have 5 minutes longer battery life!!

 

Did you just replace the whole laptop then?

With some Googling I actually found a possible supplier for the part! http://www.asusparts.eu/index.php?cPath=163571_67674_73347_73674_73713_73733

It's 30€, but if the US economy holds up and Greece continues to sink, perhaps it won't end up being so much. If I wait till I get back to the US, my insurance will probably cover it. I have accidental damage somethingoranother.

Well, it was going across Italy that it happened. Perhaps I did, But I've opened it up and couldn't find anything wrong. Everything seems to be seated correctly. It's very nerve-racking taking my laptop apart to that level. And I definitely have put it through worse before.

lol I'll give you that!

Edit: this is my last post in the triple digits. Wooo!

 

I actually finally replaced the computer about 2 weeks after my videocard went belly up. After running a functionally broken computer for a bit, the thing just decided to stop charging when it was plugged in. Finally, it died.

You could say I pushed it for all it was worth .

Good luck with the part! I personally would not pay 30 + tax + shipping for something non-nessicary, but as you can see, I'm willing to put up with more than most..

Congrats on your 1000th post!!!