Batboard

I have a Compaq laptop that (before I dropped and broke it) was great for radio programming.

Now that I dropped it, the A-drive will not read anything most of the time and the screen is all dark except for one small corner. Pressing the tab that makes the laptop think it's closed brings the screen back up as good as new, but after 2 seconds or so it darkens again and I can barely read anything.

Any ideas?

Broken trace or open solder joint near where you depress the tab button?

Do you have to press hard? Or just touching it makes the screen appear?

Other than that, it may be a bad capacitor?

If you press the tab key again, does the screen reappear?

Yep, screen appears as many times as I want if I press the tab, then fades back to almost nothing except in one corner.

I know absolutely nothing about electronics repair, so this has me stumped.

Only suggestion I can make is to keep plugging the model no. into eFray until you find one that you can use to repair this one, or at least swap the hard drive into.

I'm not familiar with "all" Comcraps, but be aware that the setup/cmos/bios can be tricky. Some of Compaq's stuff has part of the bios/setup stuff on a special partition on the hard drive. This may or may not complicate swapping the hard drive into a different model.

Does this thing have an external display connector?

wait, does it fade out like the backlight might be shot....or does the computer shut off the LCD screen like it is shutting down? If you push it and then it fades out, and does not appropriately do the shut down dance like LCDs do, where they go from IMAGE --> BLACK (with backlight) --->"No Sig" ---> Black (w/o blacklight)...then i would immediately pull the laptop apart and look at the LCD screen backlight. It may be disconnected, chipped or have it's power connection otherwise comprimised...which i tend to think is the problem, if it fades out (but you can still see stuff on the screen while it does that).