Last month, I found my 13 year old Packard Bell PC. I figured I wanted to demount the screen and use it for something new. I searched on youtube and found this video.
The video told me to buy a control board for the model I had, so I casually demounted the screen and found the model number. On the upper part of the backside of the screen it told not to touch this part of the screen, so I decided to be reasonably careful with managing the screen.
I went to ebay and bought a control board for 200 NOK (24USD), and after 1 month it finally arived. I connected the control board to my screen, found a spare hdmi cable and turned on the screen and my current pc.
The screen was on, but there was no signal.
A quick check later, I found that one wire wasn't properly plugged into the old screen. I made sure that it couldn't fall out by accident again with a tape and tried again. There was signal between the control board, but no communication between the PC and the screen.
After going through some procedures of checking wires, I suspected the reason I got no signals was because:
- I had been too reckless with the upper part of the screen.
- Although the control board could handle HDMI, the Packard Bell screen could not.
I betted my money on nr. 2, so I went to the closest store and got a HDMI to DVI converter (my PC has no DVI output, so I could not use a DVI cable). With this setup I was able to make my PC and Packard Bell screen to communicate.
However, I got these god aweful colors.
From my understanding, the DVI cable was analogue, and I had to convert digital signals from HDMI to analogue signals in DVI. So I went back to the store to purchase HDMI to DVI converter. One of the personel told me, that DVI is not analogue. From my reasoning, the issue had to be nr. 1 which was a downer.
I got back home and connected the HDMI cable from the PC to the control board and I was disappointed to see that the issue didn't miraculously disappear while I went to the store. However, I forgot to plug in the DVI to the HDMI, but there was still signal going from my PC to the Packard Bell screen. Strange... And I thought computers was predictible.
I decided to mess around with the menus on the screen. I tried to change the colors settings, then I found the language settings and changed it to english and tried to mute the screen (although there was no speakers on it.
THEN I FOUND IT:
My hypothesis of what happened is that the signals going to each pixel was too high, and it ended up messing up the colors. By turning down the brightness and contrast, the intensities of the signals were lowered causing the signals to not be altered for the worse.
I don't know exactly what I want to do with the screen just yet. Worst case scenario, I just let it lay in my room collecting dust. However, I want to do something with it. For now, my plan is to mount a small computer, i.e. a phone, raspberry pi or laptop onto it, get linux installed on it or any OS that is good with low specs, and figure out whether this product has some useful applications.
To everyone who read this, I thank you and may you be as healthy as the Zohan.
