Here are step-by-step instructions on how to replace your broken laptop’s LCD.

Before you replace your laptop screen

Before doing anything, give your laptop a full look-over and inspection to ensure the screen really needs replacement. If the graphics card on the motherboard is dead, for instance, you may be wasting your time and effort on replacing a perfectly good screen. Additionally, if the laptop has been recently dropped or otherwise possibly physically harmed, you’ll want to double-check for other damage as well.

To ensure the graphics card is functioning, you can plug a desktop monitor or TV into the laptop, as most have a standard blue VGA monitor and/or a HDMI output. If the picture looks good on an external display, your graphics card is likely good and the screen is at fault. If you don’t get any picture, keep in mind some laptops require you to press certain function keys on the laptop to activate external display output. If you do that and video stilldoesn’t display, your graphics card and/or motherboard is likely broken, rather than your screen.

If the laptop outputs to another display successfully, use the computer for a while to ensure the keyboard and other laptop components appear to be functioning normally.

Before you replace your laptop’s LCD, here are the caveats to the general steps that follow. This is not meant to be a guide for ultrabooks, two-in-ones, tablets, Macbooks, or other, more specialized notebooks, however. It’s more for average, run-of-the-mill laptops. But even then the general steps I discuss do not work for all such laptops. Some will require a different process and/or more work to replace the screen, such as accessing the motherboard by opening the main case of the laptop.