Peripherals: HP Pavilion F1703 TFT Monitor Blackout

F1703 Repair tips

OK I have a few comments about the F1703 Monitor. About 70% of what HP sells is outsourced, meaning someone else in Asia Makes it for HP and HP sells it. They are not alone, Dell and all of the other manufacturers are the same. Every computer company has products that develop similar faults, so saying one company is better than the other is a fallacy. I deal with people that swear they'll never send Dell another Penny also, so no company is immune. I work in the industry, so believe me I know. It's a sad reality. The HP F1503/F1703/F1903 monitors all suffer from a couple of different problems. It's been my experience that it is NOT, software, drivers or refresh rates, etc. This has been strictly a hardware problem. The Inverter power supply fails that provides high voltage to the 4 cold cathode fluorescent tubes that surround the LCD. The 4 Toroid coils on that board were hand soldered with inferior solder, I've seen this TOO many times coming from Asia. I have reworked several of these monitors, I TOTALLY remove the solder (with Solderwick) on the 8 connection points for these toroids, rather than just add solder to it, scraping the wire on the toroids where it protrudes through the circuit board after solder removal also ensures a better connection, take it down until you see copper. Make sure you don't leave any scrapings on the board. This ensures that you have a solid electrical connection and the enamel on the copper wire is removed. Resolder all 8 connections using fresh, high quality rosin solder. Use a lighted magnifier and look for other "cold" solder joints that are dull grey and have no shine to them, remove the old solder and replace all of these joints with fresh high quality solder. I also like to replace the 4 driver transistors 2SC5706 (C5706) (about $1 apiece you can buy them on EBay.) If you do all of this it should fix the problem the majority of the time. If you still have the "comes on and then goes right back off" issue, replace the AC Adapter. I DO NOT recommend buying an "aftermarket" version, they're not robust and tend to fail if you have power spikes. I replaced the AC Adapter with ones from an HP L1800 LCD Monitor. The adapter puts out over 5 Amps of current. The part number is PSCV700101A (Dell uses the same Model number.) It's from the same vendor. Once I redid the solder, replaced the transistors and replaced the AC Adapter I've had zero problems with the 5 or 6 of these monitors that I've rebuilt. This is a job for technicians with some component level skills. It's unfortunate that whoever the sourcing vendor for this monitor didn't use better solder in the first place. I wonder how much business HP lost over this issue. It would be hard to determine how many of these monitors have been discarded that could have been repaired, the whole thing saddens me that we've devolved into such a "disposable society". If you have any questions about this repair, feel free to contact me. When this monitor works it works very well, is bright, and has a remarakably clear image.