How to fix a broken HP LCD backlight?
If you end up deciding the laptop is a loss, there is kind of an interesting project you can do with it. You can make a TV/computer projector out of LCD monitors, or laptops (laptops can sometimes be tricky but people do it). You don’t need the backlight, in fact you have to remove the back of the screen and the backlight for it to work anyway (light is provided by a strong metal halide bulb behind the LCD screen) Check out the forums and stuff at Lumenlab (I’m currently making a projector using a nice 15.
The exact same thing happened to my HP laptop. It is pretty expensive to fix, as others have said, so, since my wife and I used it exclusively at home anyway, I bought a decent LCD monitor, and simply use the laptop as a CPU–effectively, as a desktop. That won’t work for you if you need the portability, but at least it means you don’t have to junk it entirely.
As long as it’s out of warranty anyway, try opening up the case. Look for the cable that connects the screen to the motherboard. On my Dell, it was a thick, silver cable, about 3-4 inches long. Try bending and unbending that cable (gently, gently!) and doublecheck both ends are seated tightly. Then put it all back together. This worked for me when I had the same issue, and doing it every few days bought me a few months until it (backlight) went out completely. Annoying, but I couldn’t afford to replace the laptop just then.
