Need Help. Putting a MA7 screen onto a Gateway MX6959.

Hello,

So I sold a Gateway MA7 screen from my old laptop that died from a bad power jack (didn't care to fix it) and now I'm trying to help my friend getting it running on his Gateway MX6959.

Here is as far as he can get:

When he starts the computer up the screen goes from a dark black (no power state) to a light black, indicating that it's getting power but that's all, nothing else happens.

Could it be a driver issue? I'm going to see if he can hook that laptop up via VGA or HDMI (I don't know what he has) to another monitor to see if it's possibly a settings issue.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

So I had him hook it up to the external and here is what happened:

"I did hook up the external monitor and that worked and showed the internal screen but when I chose it to display, it stayed light dark"

Any ideas?

 

Oh my god, does your friend speak english?

What he said made no sense whatsoever, you realize that right?

Moving forward... From your first post, there is a small chance drivers would fix the problem. However, windows does not feel the need to install the correct drivers in these cases anyway, there may not even be one, because the windows default driver usually works just as well.

Like I said, that is pretty unlikely.

What is likely is more unfortunate.
Best case scenario, the LCD data plug is not all the way in, or pretty much isn't in at all. If the backlight plug is in then how you described it is how the LCD would behave.

2nd best, what is the resolution of the LCD?
Sometimes, the cables do not support very high resolutions. But usually it will still display at the lower resolutions or show a garbled image.

3rd best (as in worst)... I will give you a way to diagnose this...

Tell him to reinstall his old screen.
Then, tell him to put the laptop on 'standby'....
Then... install the new screen and come out of standby.

Yes it sounds dangerous. Really it isn't very dangerous at all.
There is a good chance that the LCD will work perfectly if he does this because I think this is the problem. BUT if he ever shuts the laptop down completely it wont display again until he reinstalls the old screen again.

What this means is the laptop BIOS doesn't support the EDID or brand of the LCD. As we can see, or at least I have had the experience of seeing in many cases, it does NOT mean it CAN'T display correctly, just that it wont.

The thing is it requires BIOS modding to fix this.
Even if someone mods the BIOS, it doesn't sound like your friend would be prepared to flash it

Hope you can figure it out...