Thinkpad T61 screen issue

I have a problem with my T61's screen. Basically, it all started out about a year ago (laptop is over three years old now) where everyone once in a while, a thin horizontal white may appear across the top of the screen. This could usually be resolved by tapping the back of the screen. Later this progressed such that there may be more than one line, and I had to twist the screen to get rid of it. Eventually, this problem exacerbated into flickering, the screen failing to update, and in some cases, the screen 'white-ing' or 'purple-ing' out. Sometimes these are intermittent problems that show up every now and then and can be fixed by tilting the screen. Sometimes it gets quite bad and the tilting does not cause the problem to go away, and I have to just turn the laptop off, and it goes back to normal some time later.

I had heard that this sort of stuff could be caused by the ribbon cable linking the screen to the laptop coming loose, or being damaged. I actually opened the thing up and reseated the cable, with no effect. There was no obvious signs of damage to the cable. I also note that it seems to be pressure on the screen itself that causes the problem to go away (as in pressing on the surface of the screen makes it go away). Any thoughts on this? If people have had experience of this problem, I'd like to hear what caused it.

 

My T61 is 4 years old but I never had this problem with the screen. I would assume the cable may got disjointed or loose but it seems you already looked into that.

Before concluding the screen panel may be defective I would try and use a different LCD cable to make sure, usually they're relatively cheap to acquire on auction sites such as eBay. Hopefully that solves the problem otherwise you probably need to replace the whole screen panel itself.

BTW what graphics card you using on the T61? Using a Nvidia Quadro card may throw even more complications into the equation as they can be suspect to failure over time.

 

sounds more like a problem with the LCD or the GPU itself, does the external screen do the same thing?

 

I had considered the graphics card (Yes, it has a Quadro NVS 140), but nothing ever happens on the external screen (As in, I can think of at least one time when I had the laptop's screen and a monitor active at the same time, and the laptop's screen was going mad, but the external monitor was perfect). I might just go ahead and try a new cable for the screen, new LCDs look pretty expensive.

 

I am having this same issue. Were you able to get it fixed? What did you have to do?