What is a Laptop Hinge?

Before we dive into the specifics of laptop hinge issues and solutions, let’s start with the basics: what exactly is a laptop hinge?

A laptop hinge is a mechanical component that allows the laptop’s screen to pivot and stay in place at various angles. It is essentially the “joint” that connects the display panel to the laptop’s base, enabling you to open and close the laptop smoothly.

A typical laptop hinge consists of two main parts: the hinge itself and the brackets or screws that secure it to the laptop’s chassis. Hinges are designed to be sturdy and durable, but like any mechanical component, they can wear out or become damaged over time.

Laptop Models Commonly Susceptible to Hinge Damage

It’s worth noting that not all laptops are equally prone to hinge problems. Some home computers, such as the HP Pavilion x360, Spectre x360, Asus ZenBook, Lenovo IdeaPad, Dell Inspiron 2-in-1, Dell XPS, and Acer Aspire, have standard plastic hinges that are more susceptible to wear and tear over time. These hinges can develop issues like stiffness, wobbling screens, or even complete failure.

On the other hand, business-grade laptops like the Dell Latitude, Lenovo ThinkPad X series, W series, P series, T series, HP ProBook, HP EliteBook, HP Dragonfly, Apple MacBook Pro, and Apple MacBook Air come equipped with metal hinges that are generally less susceptible to damage. The use of metal hinges enhances their durability and longevity.

See our video of how we fix laptop hinge below:

Some computer users don’t expect their devices to fail, and see this as a sign that the computer is dying and that they need to replace it.

Like most electronics, laptops and desktop computers can break at least once in the device’s lifetime. And usually it’s not a major heart operation.

Learning more about a computer’s lifespan can help inform your decision to repair or replace your faulty computer.

What is the average lifespan of a computer?

In its early days, computers could last very long: 8 to 10+ years. Now they don’t.

Computers now last 3 to 4 years then a repair is needed to get it working again. Its performance may also drop after a few years.

Laptop cleaning guide: How to safely clean your laptop

Cleaning your laptop and devices is something a lot of computer users forget to do all the time. We’re sometimes not aware of the dust or lint that can clump up inside our computers. This can create problems down the line and should be dealt with quickly. Here’s our guide to safely cleaning your laptop inside and out.

Things that need to be cleaned off

Dust

Dust can get on and inside the laptop and cause some pretty big problems, if you’re not careful enough. A little dust inside is fine, but you should probably prevent it from accumulating.

When dust bunnies clump up inside the laptop, it can trap heat that is harmful to the system. While you use your laptop, the processor and video card can generate a significant amount of heat that needs to be dispersed quickly and efficiently. That’s where the fan comes in. The heat sink transfers the heat generated by the processors to the laptop fans, which passes out from the vents.

If dust is trapped inside the laptop and blocks the vents, this will make it harder for the fans to get rid of the heat. This may elevate the risk of overheating, something you definitely want to avoid. That’s because an overheating laptop can cause fan and motherboard failures.

Food crumbs

We all do it at some point. Eating over our laptop keyboards has become a bit of a habit today. We’ve become so reliant on our devices that daily activities revolve around them. But, the food crumbs that land onto your keyboard can find its way inside the laptop and cause trouble for the keyboard.

Unless you have a keyboard protector, food crumbs can get inside the laptop through the tiny gaps between the keys and the inside of the laptop. Crumbs that are particularly hard can jam up the keys and further damage the keyboard.

Meanwhile, sugary foods can make the connective parts of the keyboard sticky, which makes typing very inconvenient. Not to mention that it can attract bugs as well. We’ve certainly opened quite a few computers up to find creepy crawlies inside. Not something you’d want to deal with.

Skin oils

You’ll find these especially on the surfaces of your laptop, especially visible on glass-paneled screens. Fingerprints and skin oils transferred from your hands can stay on your laptop for quite a while, and are quite noticeable.

It’s not that this is something that can directly harm your computer, but this might be something you still want to clean off. You can really tell a lot about a person depending on how their laptops look.

Germs

Because of how much we use our devices, our smartphones, laptops, and desktop computers are high contact surfaces. This means that they are magnets for germs. Germs and possibly viruses can live in these surfaces for many hours, so you might want to give them a clean for good measure.

What you need

Cleaning your laptop isn’t like cleaning any other appliance, you’ll need a few specific tools and some careful hands to do so. Here’s what you need to clean your laptop thoroughly:

Compressed air can — For blowing out debris. Usually comes with a small nozzle that can reach dust stuck between small gaps.

Lint-free cloth — Microfibre cloth that doesn’t leave behind lint or cloth fibres. Most commonly used for wiping glasses and electronics, or car detailing.

Rubbing alcohol — Also known as isopropyl alcohol, a cleaning solution that can clear greasy surfaces and moisture. Can be used as disinfectant as well.

Precision screwdrivers — To open up your laptop’s back cover. Make sure you’ve got the right screwdrivers, as some laptop models make use of branded proprietary screws.

Small brush (optional ) — If you already can manage to blow out dust with the canned air, this won’t be necessary. Still a useful tool for cleaning if needed.

Thermal paste (optional) — This allows efficient transfer of heat through the heat sink and processors. You’ll need to partially disassemble these parts to reapply thermal paste.

Alternatively, you could also look online for ‘laptop cleaning kits’ that often contain a few of the items mentioned above. These could come in handy if you don’t have any of these things lying around at home.

How to clean your laptop

With the tools needed, you can finally start cleaning your laptop. Make sure you’re in a clean environment before you do so too. Clear out your desk and prepare a small bowl or tin to store the screws so you don’t lose them while you’re cleaning out the laptop.

Remember to turn off your laptop and disconnect its charger as well. This protects you from any static electricity accidents.

Cleaning the exterior surfaces of your laptop

Once you’ve done all your preparations, use the compressed air to blow on the surface of the keyboard. Try to blow out all the bits inside out of the keyboard.

After this, dampen the cloth with rubbing alcohol and wipe down the surfaces of the laptop. The keyboard, screen, top cover, all of it. If you use any computer peripherals like a wireless mouse or keyboard, do that too. This should dry off quickly and we can move on to the inside of the laptop.

Cleaning the interior of your laptop

Now this is where we have to be extra careful. Unscrew the back cover of your laptop and store the screws in the container that you’ve prepared. Then use the compressed air and give the laptop a good blow out.

The two main areas to take care of are the air vents and the fan. The vents should be at the sides or back of the laptop. Make sure you clear out any dust bunnies that block the vents and the fan. This is where heat is dispersed so it’ll need clear access.

If you’ve got the tools already, you could also partially disassemble the parts that connect the heat sink and processors to reapply thermal paste. Wipe off the leftover paste with rubbing alcohol, then squeeze a good amount of thermal paste, just enough to cover the connective parts.

When you’re done, simply screw everything back together. Don’t forget to clean your surroundings as well. If the laptop turns on normally, you’ve done your job well.

Software “cleaning” and restoring your computer

Often users may refer “cleaning” to software cleaning and restoration of their computer to factory settings, with or without keeping personal data.

This is often beneficial if you suspect that your computer has viruses or spyware. Or, sometimes you’ve just built up too many unused software and apps over the years and want to get rid of them.

In this case, a hard drive cleanup and software restoration will be your best option. This will also give your computer a small boost in performance and bring it to a “clean” state.

How often should I clean my laptop?

Laptop cleaning should be done from time to time as regular maintenance for the device. But how often should we be doing it?

For the surfaces of the laptop, it doesn’t matter that much. You can wipe it down every once in a while, and even more often as you’d like. But for the inside of the laptop, you’ll only need to clean it every 6 or 12 months. We don’t recommend opening up the laptop too much, unless you absolutely need it for repairs. Opening up the laptop exposes the laptop to the open air, and the higher the frequency that you open it up, the more accidents may happen to it.

Professional laptop cleaning and repairs at Safemode Computer Service

Prefer some much more experienced hands to deal with your dusty laptop? Or need an electric blower to clean out your desktop computer? We’re here to help. At Safemode Computer Service, we can help you clean out your laptop and reapply thermal paste on it as well. We can also help you if you need a new laptop fan, or solve your overheating problems.

Located in Inner West Sydney, our expert technicians are always happy to lend a hand and give advice on your computer problems. Come on down to our Enmore store or give us a call today!

Lines on laptop screen: how to fix image distortion issues

Any part of your laptop can fail, and that includes the screen. You may experience a single vertical line, or even a completely blank black screen. These display issues can be caused by a number of problems, and do need a bit of troubleshooting to fix. You’ll have to look into the different parts that deliver the visuals on your laptop.

In this guide, we’ll be looking at how to troubleshoot and fix different screen issues. You’ll get a better understanding of how things work, and how you can detect these issues easily.

Screen issues that you may be experiencing:

Screen distortion issues can look like a number of things. When display components start to fail, the image you see on the screen can become distorted or discoloured. The screen image may even crash completely. If some of your display components are faulty, you might experience one or a few of these errors:

• Different coloured thin lines on laptop screen (both horizontal and vertical) — These thin lines usually indicate a screen failure.
• Coloured bars shown on screen (both horizontal and vertical) — While quite similar to the thin lines of a screen failure, these bars are much wider. You can sometimes still see the image under the bars, as the image is just discoloured. This usually is caused by a video card failure.
• Bleeding screen image — This one looks like a crack where the image is bleeding through. Generally happens to physically damaged laptop screens.
• Flickering images — Another physical screen issue.
• Fading images — Commonly a screen issue, but may also turn out to be a faulty screen cable instead.
• Extremely dim screen on older Macbook with LCD screens — Macbook LCD screens use an inverter to control screen lighting, and a faulty inverter could dim the screen.
• Physical cracks on the laptop screen — A pretty obvious sign of a faulty laptop screen that needs to be replaced.

Why is the image on my screen distorted?

When you see distortion or discolouration on your screen, these errors usually point to issues with the parts on your laptop that work to display images on the screen. To understand why these errors appear, we should first look at how your laptop’s display works.

Just like every other process that happens on your laptop, different components work together to display images once you turn it on. This process requires the screen, screen cable, and the video card. Failure in any part in this process could lead to different kinds of visible errors that you need to tend to.

How a laptop displays images

Your computer delivers a seamless computing experience for you. With everything you do, it shows you everything almost instantly. This comes from the different parts of your laptop that work together to create the right display images on the screen.

It all begins with the video card, also known as the GPU. The GPU (and at times, the CPU too) first generates a constant digital image feed. This is fed through the screen cable and into the display output, that is the laptop screen. Every pixel on the screen is needed for this process as well. The image feed informs each pixel of the colour that it is supposed to change to. This is a nonstop process that shows you whatever you’re working on, watching, or playing.

So when any part in this process fails, it could cause all kinds of problems. One thing for sure though, it will all show up on your screen. We’ll have to do a bit of troubleshooting to find out what’s wrong with your laptop.

Differences in screen errors: broken screen or faulty video card?

Screen errors can look very similar but at the same time indicate some very different problems. A broken screen simply means that the image can’t be displayed properly on your laptop’s screen. But with a faulty video card, it won’t even be able to properly generate the right image feed to the screen. This means that it will show the same wonky image even on perfectly fine screens.

That’s how you can find out whether you have a screen issue or a malfunctioning video card. Use an HDMI cable to connect your laptop to an external monitor or TV. If the same distorted image shows up, then you likely have a failing video card.

For more handy tricks to test your computer on your own, read our guide “6 easy tools and tricks to test and diagnose your laptop“. We cover some tools and testing solutions to detect computer issues easily.

Can you fix display issues by yourself?

For both video card and screen problems, failing hardware can only be fixed by replacing it entirely. This usually involves taking apart your laptop and putting in new hardware. It can be quite a complicated process, depending on the model and design of your laptop.

Video card repairs

On most laptops these days, video cards are embedded on the motherboard. This means that it is a built-in part of the motherboard and cannot be removed on its own. It certainly makes it a lot harder to repair the video card.

There are a few exceptions though. Certain models of gaming laptops have detachable video cards that you can take out on its own for replacements or upgrades.

For regular laptops, you’ll either need to get the entire motherboard replaced, or get professional help from component-level repair technicians. These are both rather complex repair jobs that most computer users don’t have the experience and tech know-how to do by themselves.

Curious about motherboard repairs and why they’re so hard to do? Read our guide “Why motherboard failures are so hard to test and repair“.

Laptop screen repairs

Laptop screens are also fairly tricky to deal with. A lot of laptops these days are generally put together as one part. Parts of the laptop screen are usually glued together, where no screws are used at all. This is why we can’t replace the screen panel, or glass panel on its own.

Parts of a laptop screen

A laptop screen might look like a single piece of hardware that you can just unhinge and fit back on, but it’s not that simple. They do require a fair bit of assembly and involve many different parts. Let’s take a look inside:

• Screen — You see things on here. Usually LED or LCD displays for older laptop models.
• Back cover — Where the screen is seated, acts as protection as well. Also the top of your laptop when closed.
• Backlight — Used to light up the screen.
• Inverter — Controls the light for the screen for LCD displays. Discontinued for newer Macbook Air and Pro models with LED screens (uses the logic board to light up the screen).
• Screen hinge — Provides smooth opening and closing of the laptop lid. Made of solid metal.
• Webcam — The camera that you never look at because you’re looking at yourself on the screen.
• Wifi / Bluetooth antenna — Connects your laptop to the wifi. Seated on the back cover, doesn’t get much attention.

These parts are very delicate and take a great deal of care. Specific models that have touchscreen panels or high quality displays will typically be harder to navigate around. If you are keen on DIY and are pretty skilled at it, we of course encourage you to do so. If not, you might want to take your laptop to a repair shop instead.

Laptop screen repairs at Safemode Computer Service

Got a busted laptop screen or a faulty video card? We can help. Laptop screen damage may not be covered by your warranty or accidental damage cover, so you’ll need a third-party repair service for this.

At Safemode Computer Service, we offer free quotes after testing your computer in store (Ts & Cs apply). As a trusted service in Inner West Sydney, we are also among the top 3 best rated computer repair services in Sydney. Our experienced technicians can help with any computer issue and provide the right advice and solutions. Call us or come by our Inner West Sydney store today!

How to save your laptop from liquid damage

If you paid attention in grade school science, then you should know that liquids and electricity don’t mix. We know what can happen when you touch a lightswitch when wet hands, and that same accident can happen when you spill something on your laptop. It can also cause significant damage to the electronic circuits on your laptop.

When these accidents happen, it’s always important not to panic, and always put your safety before the laptop. At the same time, there are also ways to save your laptop from liquid spill damage, as much as you can.

What happens to my laptop after I’ve spilled something on it?

Sometimes an innocent knock from your arm can tip your drink right all over your keyboard. It happens, sometimes these things just do. Just how much trouble are you in? Depending on the type of liquid and how much of it was spilled on the laptop, it can go from completely fine to completely dead. Let’s see why.

Steer clear of these liquids

As computer technicians who have been in the game for a long time, we’ve repaired a fair few liquid spill damaged laptops. It’s not just water spills too, we’ve seen different kinds of liquid damage from coffee, wine, or even seawater. The amount of liquid could also affect the scope of the damage on your laptop. It could be just a splash of water, or a flood from leaving it out near an open window during a rainstorm.

Some common kinds of liquid spills include water, coffee, wine, or soft drinks. Naturally, the more pure the type of liquid, the less trouble it will bring. With drinks like water and black coffee, repairs jobs are quite manageable. This is because it does not leave much residue that needs cleaning up when the liquid evaporates naturally. In certain cases, laptops with water spills can survive without needing any repair work. Still, water can definitely damage or rust up the circuitry and connective points on your laptop.

Sugary drinks and corrosive liquids on the other hand though, are much trickier to handle. These not only ruin electronics, they also leave behind sugary residue that can stick up and ruin your keyboard. This makes it harder to clean the laptop. Even if your keyboard does survive, the sugary substances can cause sticky keys and wreck the keyboards mechanisms.

Corrosive liquids like beer and seawater do the most damage. If these liquids get into the motherboard, they can corrode the connective points and complex circuitry on it. The motherboard is the nervous system of a computer, so this sort of damage could possibly kill your laptop entirely.

Some accidents are hard to avoid, but it’s still a good idea to get a good understanding of what could happen to your laptop if it does happen. It might also make you more careful of your surroundings while you use your laptop too.

What not to do after you’ve spilled on your laptop

You may have heard of certain urban myths or hacks to clean and fix liquid spill damages. Some people may tell you to soak your laptop in a tub of uncooked rice. It is believed that rice can absorb the liquid in the laptop and fix it.

A laptop has a lot of complex components that can’t possibly be saved by rice. This will even bring in starch and dust into the laptop. After a liquid spill, you can’t necessarily undo what’s already damaged with these repair hacks. You might even cause more damage with the rich dust and starch inside the laptop.

What to do after you’ve spilled on your laptop

We’ve mentioned this before, but remember to keep a cool head when dealing with accidents. First thing you should do after you’ve gotten your laptop wet is to turn it off first. Don’t worry about properly shutting it down, just press and hold the power button until it shuts off. We have to be quick and dirty about this.

Remove the laptop from the wet surface, and disconnect it from the power adaptor if it is still connected. If your laptop has a removable battery, take that out too. You should also disconnect other peripherals like USB drives and mice. They draw power from your laptop, so it’s better to be safe.

Now that you’re safe from electrical shock, you can try wiping off the liquid on the laptop’s surface with a lint-free cloth. Turn it upside down to drain and dry, and that’s it.

Run diagnostics on your hardware

After the above steps, you might just be able to turn on your laptop again. If not, you should probably take it to a professional instead.

If you can turn your laptop on and it still runs, the next step is to run diagnostics on your hardware to access the damage. Sometimes it’s not apparent how much of your laptop is affected by the liquid damage, so it’s a good idea to run checks on your system.

Most computers have a built-in diagnostic tool that runs before your laptop boots up. This is known as boot diagnostics, or pre-boot diagnostics. It’s a simple and basic tool you can use to find possible faults and errors on your hardware. You can test parts on your laptop like the hard drive, RAM, or battery.

To run boot diagnostics, you’ll need to press a key specific to your laptop’s brand. This might be “D” if you have a Macbook laptop, or “F12” for Dell, “Esc” for HP, and “Enter” for Lenovo, Acer, Asus, and IBM. Press and hold this key after restarting your computer to run the tests. Your laptop will then detect and report any possible errors on your hardware.

If you do find errors, you should then take it to a computer repair shop. Liquid spill repairs are quite complicated and difficult to perform, especially on parts like the motherboard and keyboard. For badly damaged laptops that are completely dead from liquid spills, it’s best to check with a repair shop to see whether it’s salvageable.

Liquid spill repairs is a common laptop repairs that we see every week, including Apple computers. It may surprise you but this is very common. If you’ve spilled water onto your laptop, you’re not alone. In fact, I’m guilty of this too. I spilled an entire cup of hot coffee onto my Dell laptop.

This HP Pavilion DV6 laptop has been over-heating and recently has broken its bottom casing at the left hand side. Due to the damage, the laptop lid can no longer close.

How To Repair Your Laptop

Since the bottom casing is broken, we will need to replace it. This bottom casing is underneath the laptop’s motherboard, fan, heatsink, screen and everything else so this job won’t be as easy as it sounds like. Get ready to disassemble the whole laptop to replace the bottom cover.

Let’s first remove the laptop keyboard.

Disconnect all ribbon cables that you see here then remove the laptop keyboard cover.

The laptop display panel is attached onto the bottom casing, we will need to take the display unit apart from the bottom casing too.

Now we would have the laptop motherboard in its bottom casing left. Let’s remove the motherboard.

Now the motherboard is removed, take a look at the fan and heatsink units and you’ll see why the bottom casing went broken. We’ll need to remove the fan and heatsink from the board itself, then detach the fan from its heatsink.

The heatsink is completely covered in dust, there is no gap for the heat to go out, this caused over-heating problems with this HP DV6 laptop.

Using a computer brush, air duster and cleaning oil to clean out the heatsink and the laptop fan. This will stop the laptop from over-heating.

To make it even better, we will use electrical tape to wrap around the gap between the heatsink and the fan to stop dust getting into the heatsink.

Now the cleaning is done, we’ll move on to replacing the bottom casing. Let’s take a look at the damaged bottom case.

The left side of the bottom cover is damaged, thus it couldn’t give support to the display panel, which led to the facts that the laptop could not close.

Now make sure to remove the remaining parts from the bottom case too, this includes USB ports, ribbon cables, DC power jack, etc. We will need to fit all of these small parts onto the new bottom cover.

Once that’s done, we are now ready to take out a new bottom cover and reassemble the laptop in reversed order of this guide.

This process should be easier than taking the laptop apart since you’re already familiar with the build of this laptop.

With the new bottom casing, the laptop will now be able to close normally.

Over-heating problem is also fixed for good after we have cleaned out the dust.

Reported Problems:

One of the biggest challenges we have ever done! An Apple MacBook Pro 13 inch A1278 year 2011 laptop was booked in for repairs. The laptop was soaked with water (lots of water, inside a bag) and was no longer booting up.

The Repairs:

This laptop may have suffered multiple water damages. The mission of rescuing this laptop won’t be an easy ride. More than one part will need to be replaced. For this laptop, after extensive testings, we have determined that its logic board, heatsink and screen need to be replaced.

We first have a look inside this laptop.

Now let’s remove the logic board from the computer. Make sure to disconnect other parts first.

Now we can have a look at the logic board.

Testing has confirmed that this logic board is damaged and will need to be replaced. We can now take out a replacement logic board and replace it.

Here we encounter an unexpected problem. This logic board, for some reason, is different from common MacBook Pro A1278 logic boards, it’s nowhere to be found in the market.

Unable to use the common A1278 logic board, we talked to our suppliers to source for an alternative Apple logic board with the same specs.

Now we have the replacement board, installing it brought up another issue. The board’s heatsink was not compatible and had to be replaced too.

Now we have replaced both logic board and heatsink for this MacBook Pro laptop, next is to replace the screen.

Replacing screen for Apple MacBook Pro unibody laptops is never an easy job. The screen is behind a glass cover, replacing the screen means we need to remove the glass cover first. The glass cover is fragile and may break when you attempt to take it out.

Heat up the glass cover with a heat gun and remove it with a suction cup.

Carefully remove the glass cover and make sure not to damage or burn anything underneath.

Have a replacement glass cover in case you broke the original one. Always wear gloves and safety glasses to avoid injuries.

Now we should have access to the screen.

Let’s replace it with a new screen.

With new screen, new logic board, new heatsink installed, the rest of this job is simpler. Reassemble the laptop and test it out.

The laptop turns on fine and booted into Mac OS X normally. Try out other functions such as wireless, keyboard, touchpad to make sure it’s working properly.

All are working perfectly as they should be. Mission accomplished.

Looking for Apple Mac Repairs?

Does your Apple Mac have the same problem? Check our Apple Mac Repair services and Contact us now for a Free Quote. Pickup and Delivery is available for your convenience.

Reported Problems:

An Apple MacBook Air laptop was booked in with keyboard problem.

Owner of the laptop spilled water onto the keyboard of the Mac, since then the keyboard didn’t work properly. Random letters came up when typing. The laptop booted up straight into Safe Boot as if Shift key was engaged.

On this Apple MacBook Air, its keyboard unit is integrated into its aluminium casing. The keyboard is connected to touchpad unit, and touchpad unit is, via a ribbon cable, connected to logic board. Thus the problem may lie within any of these units. Replacing the keyboard unit does NOT guarantee to fix the problem. We have come across a different job (same Apple MacBook Air that had water spilt on) that had the same problem but due to both damaged keyboard and touchpad (demonstrated in another post).

The Repairs:

Using available spare parts and a number of tests, we have determined that the laptop keyboard needs to be replaced.

Let’s first have a look at its bottom cover.

Battery need to be disconnected to stop power going in to the laptop, so let’s take the battery out from the laptop.

There we’ll see logic board, fan and other parts. All these parts need to be removed before keyboard can be taken out.

Take extra precaution here because these electronic parts are sensitive, any “minor” accidental damages can cause great damages to the computer.

Once fan, logic board, wireless adaptor etc are removed from the laptop, we should have the below (speakers not yet removed).

Now let’s take out a same keyboard (integrated in aluminum case).

Different MacBook Air has different keyboard, make sure the part is compatible otherwise it will not fit and will not work.

Now we need to remove the keyboard and bottom casing from the laptop’s display panel. The job is simpler from here. Let’s put in the new keyboard, connect it to the display panel, reassemble the laptop and test it out.

The laptop starts up fine, open TextEdit and check every key.

All the keys are now working as they should. Another Apple MacBook Air laptop fixed successfully.

Looking for Apple Mac Repairs?

Does your Apple Mac have the same problem? Check our Apple Mac Repair services and Contact us now for a Free Quote. Pickup and Delivery is available for your convenience.

Reported Problems:

An Apple MacBook Pro Unibody 13-inch laptop was booked in with a strange problem. The laptop screen has lines sometimes, a blur duplicated image appeared on the screen, and the screen blacks out occasionally.

After a number of testing, we have determined that both of the laptop screen and LED cable must be replaced. Well preparation is the key for this job because this one will require a lot of time, skills and experience. Available spare parts are essential to complete the job right and important for testing.

Let’s remove the laptop bottom cover.

Let’s remove the laptop battery to stop power to the laptop.

Next, we’ve found that the laptop fan has some dust, let’s quickly clean it out. Using cleaning oil will help if necessary. Use a computer brush to clean out the dust.

Now we’ll disconnect LED cable from logic board, disconnect left speakers, then put the laptop to stand on its side.

We will then un-screw both hinges and carefully remove the display panel from bottom casing of the laptop.

Now we’ve got the display panel removed on this MacBook Pro laptop. The most difficult part is not yet to start.

Using a heat-gun, we’ll need to heat up the glass cover on the laptop display, take extra precaution here since over-heating it will cause damages on other parts inside the display. Not enough heat on the other hands will not help.

With a suction-cup, lift the glass cover up separating it from the display. Be careful here because the glass cover is fragile and can break easily if you use too much force. This process sometimes may break the glass cover so always make sure to have a replacement one in case.

Once that’s done, we can now remove the laptop screen and pull out its LED cable.

Check the screen details, make sure that you have a compatible screen and LED cable. Install the new screen and connect new LED cable.

Follow the same steps in reversed order to reassemble the laptop.

Now we’ve got an Apple MacBook Pro 13-inch A1278 laptop with new screen, new glass cover (if replaced), new LED cable, with internal fan cleaned. Let’s test it out.

So far so good, the problem is fixed and the laptop is working well.

Apple MacBook Pro laptops are designed differently comparing to others, replacing screen on these MACs requires a lot more work to be done.

Looking for Apple Mac Repairs?

Does your Apple Mac have the same problem? Check our Apple Mac Repair services and Contact us now for a Free Quote. Pickup and Delivery is available for your convenience.