Well, after about a month of frustration and research, I finally got my Penryn up and running yesterday. And the backlight finally works!
Some of you may remember my thread where I was desperately trying to find the reason why my backlight would not work after I changed the broken display bezel out for a replacement from ebay:https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/905796/
I tried a multitude of different LED driver boards, display cables, reset PRAM and SMC, and nothing seemed to make a difference. I found a number of different people who reported the same problem after replacing a display, but none seemed to post up a working solution.
As a last ditch effort, I ordered a used left I/O board off of ebay, and that fixed the problem at last!
A word of caution for those who replace theirs, be very careful when disconnecting the left fan connector from the motherboard...er "logic board." When I was fiddling with the cable, the whole connector came loose from the board
Obviously it would not be safe to run the machine with only a right side fan, since much of the heat generating hardware is on the left side of the computer. I tried like hell to resolder the connector, but the connector soon became unusable(bent/broken pins) So I ended up just soldering the fan wires directly to the board, and it works perfectly. Not the most elegant solution, I will admit, and it will be more work if/when I have to replace the left fan in the future, but it sure beat shelling out the money for a new logic board simply because of one tiny connector!
This is my first Apple computer, and I am really liking it so far. It seems to run much faster than my Dell XPS that it is replacing, and they have very similar specs.
This machine was given to me by a friend, after AppleCare quoted over $1300 to repair the cracked display bezel, and bad keyboard He ended up just upgrading to a unibody MBP rather than paying that much to fix the old machine. So I figured, I'll change a few parts on it, and it will be good as new. Then the backlight issue surfaced, and after a while I almost ready to give up out of frustration.
All told, I have a total of about $300 into the machine as it sits right now, and I can recoup some of that by selling some old parts on eBay, plus my XPS. I'm glad I saved this machine from the scrap heap!
If anyone has problems with their display backlight, try changing the left I/O board!!
Some of you may remember my thread where I was desperately trying to find the reason why my backlight would not work after I changed the broken display bezel out for a replacement from ebay:https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/905796/
I tried a multitude of different LED driver boards, display cables, reset PRAM and SMC, and nothing seemed to make a difference. I found a number of different people who reported the same problem after replacing a display, but none seemed to post up a working solution.
As a last ditch effort, I ordered a used left I/O board off of ebay, and that fixed the problem at last!
A word of caution for those who replace theirs, be very careful when disconnecting the left fan connector from the motherboard...er "logic board." When I was fiddling with the cable, the whole connector came loose from the board
Obviously it would not be safe to run the machine with only a right side fan, since much of the heat generating hardware is on the left side of the computer. I tried like hell to resolder the connector, but the connector soon became unusable(bent/broken pins) So I ended up just soldering the fan wires directly to the board, and it works perfectly. Not the most elegant solution, I will admit, and it will be more work if/when I have to replace the left fan in the future, but it sure beat shelling out the money for a new logic board simply because of one tiny connector!This is my first Apple computer, and I am really liking it so far. It seems to run much faster than my Dell XPS that it is replacing, and they have very similar specs.
This machine was given to me by a friend, after AppleCare quoted over $1300 to repair the cracked display bezel, and bad keyboard
He ended up just upgrading to a unibody MBP rather than paying that much to fix the old machine. So I figured, I'll change a few parts on it, and it will be good as new. Then the backlight issue surfaced, and after a while I almost ready to give up out of frustration.All told, I have a total of about $300 into the machine as it sits right now, and I can recoup some of that by selling some old parts on eBay, plus my XPS. I'm glad I saved this machine from the scrap heap!
If anyone has problems with their display backlight, try changing the left I/O board!!
