So You’ve Cracked Your Laptop Screen, Now What? Screen Repair?
In today’s world, the trusted laptop computer has become ubiquitous, seen operating in just about every cafe and coffee shop as well as many classrooms, libraries and boardrooms, where laptops have naturally taken the place of paper and pen.
Where once personal desktop computers ruled as kings of the computer scene, today the laptop has supplanted desktops not only in home offices but everywhere else. Your portable laptop gives you total mobility – basically allowing you to take your office with you, anywhere you go!
Laptops are much more compact than desktop setups, with everything built into one tight package, which makes such mobility possible. It also, however, makes laptops more susceptible to becoming damaged if they’re dropped (or something is dropped onto them). If your computer’s screen becomes cracked, it becomes virtually useless as far as its previous mobility is concerned. At that point, you have basically three options:
- You can retire your laptop in favor of buying a replacement. This may be a viable option if your computer is old and tired and likely should have been replaced even before it got broken.
- You can hook your laptop up to an external monitor (via the VGA-out port) and continue to use it as you would a standard desktop, sacrificing its previous mobility functionality.
- You can replace the broken screen with a new or used screen (screen repair) of the same type and be back in business just as you were before the old screen became fractured. There are advantages to each of these three options to dealing with a cracked laptop screen.
Buying a Replacement
Many experts recommend a laptop replacement after 4-5 years, although the battery may go sooner and a memory upgrade may be desirable at some point before replacement is required. If your machine’s screen gets cracked and the unit is already four or five years old, replacement rather than repair may be the most prudent option depending on the brand and the quality of the unit. Spending additional money to fix a computer that may soon have to be replaced anyway maybe a waste of funds, but getting an estimate to replace the screen never hurts.
Using an External Monitor
If you’re willing to forego the built-in portability a laptop provides by having its own monitor as part of the package, you can tether your machine to an external monitor and utilize the system as you would a more sedentary desktop computer. An advantage to this kind of setup is that you can choose a monitor of whatever size best suits your needs, which will likely give you a larger view than you had before from your built-in monitor. The obvious disadvantage to using this option to deal with your cracked laptop screen problem is that you can’t just pick up your machine and use it whatever you want because it’s not so easy to cart a monitor around with you wherever you go!
Screen Repair
Repairing your laptop’s broken screen is affected by removing the portion that contains the screen and swapping it out for either a brand new screen or a used screen sourced from a used laptop that no longer operates but that has an intact screen.
If you’re nervous about repairing it yourself, any decent computer shop should be able to fix you up. A repair is cheaper than a total laptop replacement and will ensure you retain your machine’s mobility as it was intended to be.