Display problems. I think I messed up.

Hi everyone,

Please bear with me and read the entire post and tell me if I could recover from my mess.

I’ve been in and out of the forum for the last 2-3 years reading in particular about aftermarket upgrades. I’ve also posted on the forum in the past as I had few problems with an old aging Compaq laptop. Since, I’ve moved on.

Now, I own a Dell Inspiron 1300 laptop with a Celeron M 360 which I pin modded to 1.86GHz. As the pin mod went well I decided to buy a second hand laptop and upgraded as much as I can for the cheapest amount possible. I went to ebay about three months ago and I bought a faulty Gateway MX3101B with a smashed screen and a missing harddrive. I was pleasantly surprised as apart from the missing harddrive and the smashed screen the laptop seemed to be in full working order.

The Gateway came originally with a Celeron M420. Few weeks after buying the Gateway I bought from ebay an IBM/Lenovo R60 with a casing in a very poor state and lot of missing part. I bought it because the 15” screen (1400x1050) seemed ok and because it had a core duo T2500 processor. My plan was to keep the T2500 and use the money from the IBM 15” LCD to buy a 14.1” WXGA for the Gateway. So, soon as I received the IBM I took both it and the Gateway apart and upgraded the CPU on the Gateway from the original Celeron to the T2500. So far so good. Few weeks after that I bought a second hand harddrive, so, all that is still missing on the Gateway is a screen. While waiting to find a screen at a good price I decided to use the IBM 15” screen with the Gateway so I could install on the harddrive the OS and the drivers. Every thing went fine until I installed the drivers for the Ati GPU. When the Gateway was restarted there was a pinky nuance on the IBM screen. I turned the Gateway off and checked the display cable and the inverter and restarted the computer and the pink colour just went away.

I finished installing the rest of the drivers and also installed RMclock. I undervolted the T2500 until I got it stable at voltage of 1.037v for the 12x. I was able to lower the voltage a bit more for the 11x. The 10x, 9x, 8x, 7x, 6x multipliers were all stable at 0.950v. It was getting late so I turned the Gateway off and went to bed. Two days after that I decided to use the IBM screen again on the Gateway and start installing some of my favourite software. Things did not go as smooth as the first time. The screen of the IBM was completely black. I suspected that somehow I burned the inverter. I found another inverter in full working order and tested the laptop again. No chance I think I burned/damaged the second inverter too.

I decided to risk it and test the Gateway with the screen from my working Dell laptop. I was then able to see a very dim image of windows desktop with either the original Gateway inverter or the second one I mentioned above. I couldn’t test the IBM screen on my Dell laptop because the Dell display has some clips that makes it impossible to fit on the IBM screen. I couldn’t also use the Dell inverter on the Gateway because the Gateway display cable uses a different plug to connect to the inverter compared to the Dell laptop.

I did something else which makes me almost certain that I damaged both the Gateway and the other inverter. OK I’ll try to explain what I did and hope you’ll understand me. A screen has a socket for the display cable. I connected that to the Gateway laptop display cable. The screen has also a plug with two wires (one white and the other pink) which I connected to the Dell inverter which in itself was connected the Dell laptop. What I mean is the screen was receiving the display signal from the Gateway laptop and the power from the Dell Laptop. I turned both computers on and the Gateway was displaying windows desktop on the Dell screen with the correct brightness.

What I want to know after this test is:
Did I damage the Gateway motherboard (i.e. the GPU)?
Did I damage the Gateway inverter-display cable?
Did I only damage in the inverters? And if yes where they damaged by the IBM screen?
Did I damage the inverters and the IBM screen but not he Gateway mobo?

Sorry for the long post but I thought to get the maximum of help I should tell you the whole story.

Thanks in advance for your help.

 

please help!