Black screen on PenCentra

Hello all,
I have just bought a PenCentra on e-bay ; perfect cosmetic condition, low price but … doesn’t power up ; when the unit is plugged, the power led turns orange than green after a while but that’s about it.
Tried hard reset, with and without the battery, screen contrast, … no luck.
So in short, I have bought a bi-colour led.
Has anybody a great idea on what could be wrong and easily repairable by a non-specialist ?

Assuming that I eventually manage to get this thing working, which e-book readers would you recommend ?

Thanks.

Might be a dead battery - I don't recall offhand whether the PenCentra will power on on AC power without the battery.

For e-book readers, two recommendations: 1) Mobipocket Reader 4.8 (the last H/PC release); and 2) uBook ("MicroBook" ). Both are free.

Edited by CE Geek 2007-12-20 4:24 PM

The Pencentra 200 will power up without the battery in it.

If you take the battery out when powered up it will turn off.

You may find the backup battery is completely flat. I hadn't used mine for 2 years and it took 2 weeks or so for the backup battery to charge from low to high.

You could try holding the reset button whilst you power it up.

Also in transit maybe the cpu board came loose or something. Pop the covers off the back and check that they daughter boards are screwed down properly.

When you power up does it make any noise? If it's just the screen then you should be able to hear some clicks. If you hit the speaker button it should beep after a couple of hits at least - if no noise then you have more than just a dead screen. What did the seller say?

Good luck,
Al

Thanx for the info, Al. I second your advice.

Thanks for your answer.
As there was no noise on power-up (which as you mentioned meant that the problem was not (only) the screen) I finally decided to buy another PenCentra.
I found 2 “second hand” Pencentra 200 on e-bay for 25€ (inc. shipping) ; nice price, except that on the first machine, the screen was severely punched, as if someone had used a screwdriver as a stylus ; the screen of the other machine looked fine except that someone had let the screwdriver fell on it, only once but from the second floor : half of the screen is black. Both machines work, though (that is, provided you don’t need the right part of the screen of the 2nd machine …).

As the three machines had the same type of screen (transmissive, I intend to use the machine indoors), I replaced the upper half of one of the 200 (the “screen” half) with the 130 one. And … it worked !
So I now have a working 200 plus a punched-screen working 200 plus a non working 130 mainboard and a broken 200 screen.

First thought : maybe I should stop buying things on ebay.

Second thought : I wonder if it is possible to replace the faulty LCD part of the broken 200 screen with the LCD extracted from the punched-screen 200 (probably not).

It's possible that the ROM is bad on the first PenCentra you got; if you can swap out ROMs between that one and the other one with the bad display, you might have a second working PenCentra. (That is, if it wasn't the first one that you swapped the display half with. ) Swapping ROMs (or even swapping motherboards) should be easier than swapping LCDs - though the latter is possible too. (I've done it successfully with a few other CE devices.)

Edited by CE Geek 2008-08-05 3:54 PM

My problem is that I have 2 bad displays ; considering that the PenCentra screen consists in three different layers ie 1. the “pressure sensitive” part, 2. the LCD itself and 3. the backlight (for the transmissive type), I have one screen with a faulty “touch part” (works but scratched) and another one with a bad LCD.
I assume that the three layers are more or less independant, as the machine correctly answers to the stylus in the area where the LCD is broken.
The only solution I see is to swap either the “pressure sensitive” part or the LCD.