Tearing Apart a PowerBook G4 Titanium

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Many months ago, I purchased a Titanium PowerBook off of eBay in desperate need of repair. It had a few busted components, but nothing a little elbow grease couldn't fix. Ever since it arrived, it's been sitting in my closet. Today I cleaned it, and took it apart. I could put it together again, but it was in pretty poor shape to start with, so rather than cram it back into the titanium case, I decided that I should probably build something else out of it.


But first, I needed to get the display working. I knew there was a problem with the backlight on this machine when I bought it, so in advance, I had gone ahead and purchased a functioning backlight. Because it's such a pain in the butt to strip the backlight from the LCD screen, they sent me the whole LCD screen, which was nice of them, but meant that I would have to strip and swap the LCD screen from one unit and put the backlight from the other onto the system.
While the LCD with the working backlight was mostly usable, it had several vertical stripes running across the screen. I opted to make the transplant.


It sounds easy, but it took me the better half of the day, and I have the bent bezels and the sore hands to show for it. Sadly, when I closed up the LCD, I must have clamped something too tightly, as there's a small dead pixel area in the bottom left hand corner of the screen. I'm thinking that the gutted machine might make a good wi-fi picture frame.


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