Hi team. My old Dell Inspiron 9100 Laptop suffered a screen failure recently which I tracked back to a compact fluorescent tube failure.
As no one sells replacement tubes in NZ (that I could find) I purchased a screen on Trademe from a later model Inspiron (9400 Samsung LTN154X3-LO9). Both are 15.4"
When I plugged the thing in I ended up with the same issue - no backlight. The graphics work fine. A new inverter did not fix the problem.
Here's the weird thing; having nothing to loose I swapped the inverter for the one that came off the junked old screen. This fired up the backlight to about 35% brightness.
Here's the even weirder thing; when the power cable is unplugged on the laptop which usually dims the display - it brightens up to about 75% brightness! I guess this is because of timing etc to a very different tube.

My questions are:
- Is there no reason this should not work? - ie do I just have two dud inverters?
- Or; is this a hardware compatibility issue that is either
  A) Insurmountable/un-fixable
  B) Able to be worked around in Windows XP or BIOS.

Please give me any ideas as I'm stuck and about ready to buy an external monitor which can be used on a desktop PC when I finally get rid of the old Inspiron. However, with all this hardware on the desk, it seems a shame to give up if there is a fix.