I thought I would write a blog entry about my recent experience with my Compaq laptop, the effort to fix it and the eventual modification that occurred. I am the owner of a very nicely designed Compaq X1000 series laptop. 15” wide screen, ATI 9200 mobility graphics card, 512MB PC2100 RAM and a good mobile processor. Under then Centrino marketing brand, it actually offers the battery life (3.5-4 hours) and light weight (just over 6lbs) as advertised. For someone who travels as much as I do, this laptop is great and it a respectable game player as well!

Anyhoo, about 10 months ago, my LCD started to display some weird flicker and finally gave out. Fortunately, it was still under warranty and I was able to send it in for repair. Flash forward to January 05. Same screen flicker started to occur except that I was now out of the warranty period. After looking into service pricing, I concluded that unless I could fix it myself it was better to just buy a new laptop rather than spending the money on fixing this one. So how to fix? Off to Google!

First stop was to the http://X1000Forums.Com site. There was a wealth of information on this particular laptop and there seemed to be a number of people who had problems with the LCD. Hmmmm. It turns out that the LCD was not the problem at all but, rather, the flex cable that connects the LCD, power inverter and video card. It seems that this is a very flimsy cable and was the cause of my problem. That should be easy to fix, just order the cable from Compaq, open and replace. Wow! I just turned a $1200 problem into a $30 one. Well, not as simple as I thought....

While the flex cable has a specific part number, HP/Compaq will not sell it separately. In order to fix a $30 problem, you must buy a $1000 LCD panel that includes the cable.

Again, HP/Compaq is making you pay $1000 to fix a $30 problem!?!

It was my understanding, after speaking to a parts supplier, that they used to sell the cable separately but stopped. I guess they figured they could make more money ripping off consumers who don't know better. I mean someone had to pay Carly's $42M exit package right? As much as I like the performance and form of this laptop, I could never recommend one to a friend due to this kind of practice.

Back to the problem. eBay is a do-it-yourselfer's heaven. Found a company that sells spare parts and picked up the cable for $55 plus shipping. Cable arrived and everything worked great! So , I'm sitting there and looking at this pile of parts, ready to reassemble the laptop and I stopped. A mess of gray and black. How unoriginal! Now that I have it apart, why not personalize it a bit? Off to the web again!

For anyone looking to do system/case mods, the place you need to go is Yoshi's Forums. Yoshi used to be a regular on TechTV's (now G4TV) The Screen Savers, which was one of the best shows on the whole network, and he was the modding expert. You needed to know how to water cut a side panel? Yoshi's your man! Any way, his forums will teach you almost any case mod you need. Being a laptop, my options were limited and I figures the best route was to paint it. That's right, paint!

Below are some pictures of the laptop in process and the final result! Check them out:

And there you go, modded laptop! Not as difficult as one might think and adds a bit of flavor to the plain old laptop. Got any mods to share with us? Post below!