Question for Techie Types -

Ok Techie types - I have a vertical white strip through the middle of my laptop screen.
I looked online and read that it was a stuck pixel. I downloaded pixel repairer. Their instructions say that when I make the screen black I will be able to see the stuck pixel - then I put the fixer on it and it repairs it. But when I make the screen black I don't see a stuck pixel - just the white line. There is no white line when the background is green, yellow or magenta. Any ideas? Thanks.

it is, unfortunately, probably your laptop monitor.
if there is a video out port, hook your laptop to another monitor (sometimes you can use TVs).
if you still see the white line on the other monitor, then it is *not* your laptop monitor.

Good Luck

Good tip - thanks!

Whitedog gives good advice. Try that. If test one above shows another monitor with no white line then could be a loose wire. Wiggle the monitor gently on the hinges and see if gets better or worse.

Are you old enough to remember how Fonzie used to fix the jukebox down at Arnold's? Give that a go with the lid closed.

And there is a rationale for doing that; cold solder joints or other intermittent connections. If you give it a "tap" and it works then its probably a connection and not a bad component, be it laptop, TV or anything else. (You'll have to judge yourself just how hard to "tap" it.)

Cold Solder joints are where components were not properly soldered in the initial process, usually because one portion of the joint wasn't hot enough. You can't always see them, but when you can they will look something like this:



You can see the space around the wire on the right side but not on the left, and what probably happened was that wire wasn't hot enough for the solder to adhere to it. Its been a while since I've worked regularly on electronics but as I recall it wasn't unusual for something to work OK for years before the joint became a problem.

I figured it was worth posting this because it might help somebody at some point in the future figure out if their broken device was worth trying to fix or not.

Hey
Orderly....
Thanks the cold solder joint... will share with my engineer father, he has always loved finding them on circuit boards.