... versus the LTM10C320P for the Panasonic. Both made by Toshiba for a neat little love triangle. I ordered up the base/Sony part after a lot of fruitless Googling. Trying to track down the P, I talked to a lot of online retailers that had it in their online catalogs marked AVAILBLE, CALL FOR PRICING. One place I called, I got a squirrely Chinese lady I could only understand with great difficulty. I wish she were my good friend. She said they had the 320 but not the 320P. I asked what the difference was. She said, "the hinges! The 320 has the hinges, built-in!". I had a hard time imagining this. So, the part shows up, and it's clearly similar, and the controller and panel itself are apparently the same, but the plastic casing in the assembly is larger and is encased in a metal frame (unlike the Panasonic P part). After thinking about returning it and getting my $500 back, I open it and start cutting.
Actually, I tested it first, and my backlight driver logic isn't strong enough to power the cold cathod tube in the Sony part. Argh! So I transplant mine, cracking in four places even though I'm being extremely careful. Argh! Does anyone know what the consequences of this are likely to be? It seems to still work for the moment, but I'm imagining all of the extra special cold-cathod-lamp gas leaking out and it being a specularly unimpressive nitrogen-carbondioxide-oxygen lamp. If you haven't seen one of these, they're about a billion of an inch thick and as long as your screen is wide, and they go in a thin metal casing attached to the diffuser behind the actual LCD panel. The LCD panel itself is among the thinest glass you've seen, and outside of the rigid screen frame, a fly landing on it will send a crack shooting through it. Take it out of its assembly and you'd better not breathe on it. Next up, the plastic casing is trimmed with scisors (while the LCD panel is leaning out away from any torque created by the scisors), and then the metal casing, and then its bolted together. Then I put it in the laptop's lid casing and spend about an hour trying to get everything routed correctedly and aligned.
And now it works, for the moment, but I'm extremely dubious of the whole setup. Is there a pressure point that even a little pressure will hit and push a wire into the LCD and crack it? There's no room to spare the CF-R1's lid. Will the lamp give out? Will I just go break the screen again, for a third time?
It seems like I spend more time fixing my computers than actually using them... to say nothing of the overhead of moving files around, backing up, upgrading, and other sysadminy overhead. Am I in the wrong line of work?
-scott
