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helios16v

macrumors regular
Original poster
Nov 1, 2008
149
0
Earth
I made quite the impulse buy in the summer on a Mid 2010 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo 13" MacBook Pro, 320GB HDD and 4GB of RAM. Picked it up for $300 off of Kijiji from an older gentleman who was selling it for his daughter.

The laptop would power on but would not display any video so I figured since I've fixed a few HP laptops with GPU problems as well as some Playstation 3's and Xbox 360's I would man up, throw some cash down and fix this laptop for next to nothing and resell for a quick easy profit. However, that was not the case. While I tried reflowing the logic board there was already a repair to the display cable connection where someone actually managed to get a tiny little contact of solder repairing one of the broken traces but when I reflowed the logic board it melted into a little glob across a few traces so now it wouldn't even start up after I had it reassembled. I'm assuming the logic board is a loss from this point on so I now have it sitting in an old iBook box in my closet because I lost interest after it wasn't easy to fix :p

I started pricing out parts earlier this evening and I found a place online I can send away a water damage logic board for $130 shipped, and a whole water damaged logic board for $170 shipped, so $300 later and I'll have a working logic board to pop back into this sucker. ($600 MBP, not bad)

Now the portion of which is concerning and why I'm making this thread is I read a few things telling me that if I replace the logic board without fixing a back light issue the failed LCD will short out the logic board causing this problem again. I have no way of telling if this was an LCD failure or Logic Board failure before I tried fixing it so I don't know which one I need to replace first.

If I DO happen to have a bad LCD backlight and I reassemble the MBP with this newly repaired logic board, will a bad LCD cause this logic board to fail again or is this just myth and precaution to get more money out of me?

If this actually will happen if my LCD is bad then I will fix it first so I don't have to get the new logic board fixed twice. What do I need to replace in the LCD? Everything online tells me I need a whole LCD and there is nothing I've found telling me if I can take the LCD apart and just replace a component of it for cheaper.

What would the list of parts be that I need to make this repair.
So far I have down the water damage logic board for $170 and once I get that I'll send it away to get fixed for $130. I'm also picking up 8GB of RAM for $40 and a 1TB HDD for $75. What else should I be buying to fix the LCD or do I really need to buy a whole complete LCD for $160 before installing that new logic board?

Total build price would be $715 or $875 if I need a whole new LCD. I've only found one similar auction on eBay selling for $1050 so I feel like I've still scored a good deal if this all comes together as planned.
 
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