Recently my laptop screen would go white while the rest of the computer still worked. I would be listening to music and the whole screen would go white, but the music would keep playing.

A few days ago the screen went permanently white. It's not pure white - there are varying shades of gray taking up whole vertical blocks of the screen.

If I plug it into an external monitor, the display on the external monitor is fine. I can see all of my things and I've backed up all of my data that way. But the screen remains an issue.

I just want to know what the issue is - is it a bad inverter or backlight or is the LCD just broken and needs replacing? It's only 2.5 years old so I would hope that the LCD didn't just run out of life, and at about $150-170 to repair the whole display, I'm looking for a less expensive way to repair my laptop.

I am not afraid to do soldering or delicate repair work - I already did some repair fixing the speakers on the screen a while back when the wires started breaking due to the opening/closing stress. (Apparently this is a common problem.)

Thanks for your help.

P.S.: If this ends up being irreparable, I have some parts for sale. =P

First of all, it could be as simple as the LCD display cable coming unseated/ dying. That it works with external monitor tells me that the graphics card is fine. So what you need to do, is unplug and re-seat the display cable and check if that makes any difference (this can be accessed by taking off the hinge cover, see service guide linked below for illustrated instructions). If it doesn't, try and get your hands on a replacement on ebay, parts-people.com or even Dell... shouldn't set you back much.

Give that a go and let us know.

Service manual:
http://support.dell.com/support/edoc...n/sm/index.htm

Stu