Okay, so I bought a Vaio TX790 from a seller in San Francisco for only….$460!!!  :D   Yep, beleive it or not and its in my dirty paws. I’ve always wanted an ultraportable ever since I had the Lifebook P5020D and accidentally killed it and was stuck since then using disgusting large 14.1 and 15.4” notebooks.  :wink:

So glad to be back in ultraportable heaven again.

Of course there has to be a catch right? Right, I bought it knowing it had a screen problem. There is a thick, vertical dead white band running down near the middle of my screen and even for only $460, whose complaining!?

I have taken pics of it which are below.

I have absolutely zero knowledge about laptop repair. I posted a Craigslist ad asking people to help me out and several people have offered to look at the laptop for me. But, some of them say the LCD itself needs replacing, and some say its merely some cables/wires that were damaged. Of course, I have no idea about any of this so the first thing I should do is take it to someone to have a look at it and pinpoint the exact cause right?

Or can you helpful sleuths help me out here please? Can the pics help you to figure out if the LCD is broken and needs replacing or only some wires/cables need fixing? I really hope its the latter.  :(

Thanks again and I hope you can help me because I really want to get this baby fully working and dump my regular laptop.

Oh and also, I had read several posts about the TX having problems with the color red, I think people said the screen has a bit of a reddish tint to it? Just wanted to say I haven’t noticed any of it, in fact, after comparing this to my current Compaq V3000’s screen, the Compaq’s screen has a reddish tint to it which I never realised.

The TX so far has the best screen I have ever seen, very bright, wide and crisp.  Now, I really just have to fix that annoying white band.

ouch, that stripe does not look good.  I havn’t personally dealt with the TX series yet and i havn’t even had to do much troublshooting with my t370 yet.  However, i have repaired a number of laptops, including some of the earlier vaios as well as laptops from every manufacturer (including apple).
The bad news: I’ve never seen an issue like that.  Here are my thoughts:

I would hope its the screen, because I suspect that its the graphics card, which is integrated into the board.  You can try pluggin in an external monitor, but it may not tell you much even if it works perfectly.
Take apart the laptop and get the numbers on the back of the screen.  Often, you can replace the screen with an identical screen from another laptop much cheaper, if there are any other laptops that use the same screen (considering the TX series used OLEDs for backlighting, probably not).
Watch ebay for people selling the screen cheap from a laptop being parted out.  You should be able to find one for under $200.  Also, try to get the cable and power thingy (forgot the name, but its the chip between the monitor and board that regulates power).
With any luck, you won’t have to replace the board.

sexy white stripe u got - like some ferrari challenge stradale external finish

ps: try sony service :wink: