Any chance of getting this old Presario running?

From time to time a piece of junk, erm, nice machine will come my way. That's the case for this laptop as well - a Compaq Presario 1200 with the following glorious configuration: Celeron 800MHz, 64MB onboard RAM with 4MB taken by the onboard Trident graphics :laugh: (but it's got an expansion slot for up to 256MB extra), Via Vinyl audio, 6GB HDD, a CD-ROM, a floppy drive and a battery which apparently still holds some charge. A 12" 800x600 (lol) TFT rounds up the package.

A neighbour received it for free from a friend of his in Italy, and he asked me if i can fix it. It used to hang before the windows load screen, it's because the keyboard is bad. Either one of the keys gets stuck or the keyboard is fried altogether, but anyway i got it to work by removing its keyboard and using an USB one.

But this isn't its worst problem. For some reason, the display looks like this:


That is, very dull and with inverted colors. However, when i first boot it or when i change resolution, the display will look like this:


Aka how it's supposed to, but it fades away after about 10 seconds. I'm curious as to what would be the cause, is it bad screen or bad motherboard? On an external monitor the picture looks fine. I've checked the flex cable on the motherboard side, i'll take apart the LCD frame now and look at the display side too, but something tells me it isn't the cable.

Since it doesn't even have a network card built-in i'm sure he won't want it back, so i'll probably be able to buy it from him for $10 or something. It's one of those things with desktop parts, so i'm thinking that a PIII-1000 would speed it up considerably. I have one of those lying around. Also the thing has some AWESOME speakers - it says they're made by JBL - if they fit, i'm gonna transplant them into my DV9000, as its speakers have broken over time, and sound awful right now.

So, anyone who has seen a similar screen issue?

 

What does it look like when you pull up the character-based BIOS screen? Clear or still wavy/distorted?

Try to load up a 'live' linux distro, see if the screen quality improves. Linux distros are usually loads better in their support of ancient hardware.

If the screen quality does improve, chances are you need to double check video card device drivers for XP. There may or may not be updated dev drivers available for a old trident video chip. This may be an unsurmountable problem unless you are content to run Linux on the thing.

If your display can't be improved under XP or Linux, then the machine is probably toast and not worth a whole lot of effort or $$$.

 

I'm quite sure it's not a driver issue. Besides, i used to have a laptop with Trident CyberBlade - i had WAYYYY more troubles running that in Linux than i did in XP as the drivers would keep on hanging the system at random. I was so pissed that i wanted to patch the drivers myself, but the full source was nowhere to be found, and the author, vanished.

Btw, the screen is not wavy, it's like the contrast had been turned to minimum. I just finished checking the other end of the flex cable - it's fine. The BIOS screen looks just fine in the first few seconds, then it dims too. However there's something interesting on the laptop's keyboard - CONTRAST CONTROLS. Methinks someone played with them, and like i know those old laptops, they'll keep the Fn key settings in the BIOS. But since the keyboard is kaput, and the USB one doesn't get picked up in the BIOS, how the heck am i supposed to reset the contrast? The thing has only one PS/2 port, and it's for a mouse...

I'll get that CD-ROM back in there and try to boot a live CD. Edit: Of course it doesn't let me... It's not set for booting from CD by default. I reset the CMOS and still same thing. If it is the contrast controls, they're either stored in flash (like the password) or there is a hardware issue.

Edit 2: I figured it out, there was something wrong with a 5v supply on the LCD board. I connected my bench supply and set it to 5.3v and it was working fine. However the supply decided to jump on its own from that 5.3v to like 8v, leaving a hole in the display controller IC. Well, to the trash it goes.