PB165 screen

[werdna]

I have a PowerBook 165 with a very finicky screen. It's not a system I really want to keep, and I'd like to eventually trade it with someone for something else. I can't run system 6 on it, and the heft of system 7 kind of hampers the usefulness of the machine for me.

In any case, I have to carefully adjust the display after turning it on to get the brightness and contrast just right, and it has orthoginal line artifacts extending from shapes displayed on the screen. I'll attach a couple images. How much of this is passive matrix display crappiness and how much of it is indicative of this possibly desperately needing a recap? There's also an odd artifact in the about this mac box where the system's ram usage is listed; any idea what's causing that?

 

[3lectr1cPPC]

It desperately needs a recap. The monochrome passive screens can look pretty good with fresh caps, the grayscale ones were never that great though. The artifacting and banding won't go away but it will be much less noticeable. The contrast difference down the horizontal middle of the screen with go away too. Not sure what's up with the RAM glitch.

 

[rollmastr]

I agree 100%. Do not use it in this condition as there will be electrolyte everywhere and it might short out one of the driver chips and ruin your LCD. Ask me how I learned that. I was too late with recapping my 165 LCD and half the screen kept glitching. I ended up getting another LCD and recapping it before even turning it on.

In B/W mode these screens are quite nice, but in grayscale mode you will get some artifacting even out of a functioning screen.