1/3 of my P35-S609 display is black?

Hey, everyone I hope i've come to the right place. I would appreciate any assistance I can receive on what could be the probable cause as to why my Satellite P35-S609's screen has about a 1/3 of the left side completely black?

I'm more familiar with PC's not laptop hardware repair, but I feel I can tackle this issue myself, but would like any inputs first so I do not go out buying the parts that could not be causing this issue.

Not sure what to replace?

LCD Panel
Inverter
Backlight

Thanks everyone.

 

if it's the backlight, you'd have a halo effect around the dark area from the rest of the screen.

I think it's one of the wires connecting your LCD to the mainboard- those are ribbon cables- notoriously weak and shoved into a small space, and always get rubbed and worn by the screen hinge.

Can you provide a pic of how much of the screen is actually black? Check to see if you can see anything on the black portion (this rules in or rules out the backlight).

 

I will take pics when I get home. I also do not see any type of halo effect around the edges of the part that is black on the screen. I also did take a flashlight to see if I see anything within the black portion and it is just completely black.

 

Ok, I've got pictures now so you guys can see what exactly I am referring to. Hopefully this will help narrow down to what is the exact cause of this.

 

Anyone have an idea as to what is the problem? I would really appreciate your inputs. Thanks

 

Have you tried connecting the laptop to an external monitor? Does the external monitor display the same sort of effect. It seems like a common issue with Toshibas. There was a thread last week on the same issue. I would say this is an issue with eiher the LCD panel, BIOS(check if Toshiba has any updates for your system) or the graphics card.

 

I will go through those tests (miner). I will report back, with my findings/results. Thanks!

 

Ok, so I went through the step of connecting the laptop to an external display and it comes out fine on the external monitor. I looked into the BIOS upgrade, but it looks like the BIOS update is for the ones with the Nvidia cards. I have an ATI video card in mine. I did see the BIOS update for the ATI video cards, but nowhere in there does it say it corrects a black bar issue.

So it would most likely be the LCD panel is bad? Also I took the back cover off of the LCD and noticed a very very slim cable that connects to the LCD, does that come right off if I were to replace the LCD panel?

Just to make sure also, it would not be the inverter or backlight issue right? (sorry I do not know the symptoms of if the inverter or backlight is bad).

 

It might be the BIOS considering the number of Toshiba's being affected. I would recommending contacting Toshiba & check if your model is afflicted by the same issue or maybe you have a defective LCD with 1/3rd of the pixels dead. Did this issue suddenly appear or was it there right from the begining when the laptop was purchased?

It would not be a backlight issue since part of your screen is totally black meaning the pixels are off. if the backlight was the culprit it would darken the whole screen. Usually most laptops have 1 backlight & it will run through the bottom of the screen and it would not cause such an issue.

 

The issue just suddenly appeared, there were no changes made to the system at all prior to this occuring.

Looks like I will be contacting Toshiba to see if I can find out if there is a BIOS update that can correct this, which would be strange now that I think about it how it can possibly fix it, when it was never a problem before with the same BIOS ver. But I guess its worth a try... I'll post back when I get some answers.