[Durham] Weird laptop monitor issue

[Nick]

Hi,

So my laptop monitor has started doing a weird thing, and I was
wondering if anyone on the list might have thoughts or advice.

When the monitor is 'turned on', whether through turning the laptop
on, opening the lid, waking from suspend, or after the monitor has
been turned off by ACPI, it shows only solid white, and makes a
small high-pitched whining sound. Moving the lid a bit up and down
for a few seconds generally sorts it out, and everything behaves
normally again. Recently it has started taking more wiggling and
waiting for it to start working.

Which makes it sound like a loose connection, right?

The thing is, my brother, who has the same model of laptop (EEEPC
901), had the same problem last year, and after various attempts to
fix it, from wedging the monitor cable into place to buying a new
cable to buying a new monitor, nothing helped for long. He ended up
buying another EEEPC from eBay and putting his old hard drive in
that, which unsuprisingly worked like a charm.

I'm likely to do similarly, but thought I'd throw this out to the
list, in case anybody has any suggestions or thoughts? It would be a
pity to have to replace it; everything else works great (granted I
have gradually replaced a lot of the internals over the years).

Thanks in advance for any clues or advice,

Nick

(Who will make it to one of the meetings someday, honest!)