Uh oh... got this weird bright spot on my laptop screen...

Ok, so I've heard of dead pixels... got one of the damned things on my digital camera screen... but a patch of glowing, overbright, white, pixels?? If I rub the area 'just right' with a fingertip the overbright patch goes away, but only for a few seconds. Wassup with that?  It doesn't show up in a screen scrape, so I can't even show it to you... its the weirdest thing... its like somebody is shining a really tiny torch at the screen.  I wonder if this laptop is still under warranty ((oy Peter, let's talk about that laptop you sold me!!!!  Damn, he's overseas)

Just what I need... more hardware problems... what with the UPS committing seppuku (also known as "hari kari" for the benefit of you gaijin), and nearly losing my RAID1 when a hard drive failed, and the lift (aka elevator) at the office refusing to move as soon as I stepped into the flipping thing (I swear, that building hates me), and I/0 hardware errors affecting my backup tape drive, and schizophrenic printer drivers on the network, the last thing I need is weirdly funky screen issues on my laptop.

Yes, yes, I know.. you read this blog for more important stuff than weird display glitches on my laptop and an impromptu lesson in Japanese lingo ... I promise I'm in the middle of completing a very cool article on IE's phishing filter for the Internet Explorer Community at microsoft.com, so hang in there - there are statistics and everything ;o)

Published Tue, Mar 28 2006 14:14 by sandi

Comments

# re: Uh oh... got this weird bright spot on my laptop screen...

Tuesday, March 28, 2006 11:53 AM by Alun Jones
Liquid crystal displays, such as the one on your laptop, are transmissive. As such, they rely on blocking, partially blocking, or not blocking, a light that comes through the display from its back (hence, the backlight).
These liquid crystals polarise light in different directions (think of a plucked string - if if passes through a slot that is aligned with the direction of pluck, the wave will travel through; if the slot is at 90 degrees to the pluck direction, the wave will stop at the slot), depending on the voltage applied to them (whether this is current passed, or electromagnetic effects, I don't know).
Your 'soft spot' is going to be caused by one or other of degradation of the liquid crystal, or loss of power transmitting abilities to the region. Or it could just be because that area of the screen got thumped, smushing out some of the crystal.
Regular massage may help this in the short term, but in the long term, you need to stick some black insulating tape over that area of the screen, with yellow "caution; do not cross" tape around it, and never display anything else there.
Or get a new laptop / display.