A cracked laptop screen is a repair or a sale, and which one depends on the laptop and on a written quote. If you’re keeping it, get it fixed. If you’re about to part with it, compare the repair price with how much more we’d pay for it once the screen works, and send it as it is unless the repair costs clearly less.
Repair it or send it as it is
We won’t guess at a repair price here. Screens differ by model, by size and by whether the panel is a touchscreen, and a figure from somebody who hasn’t seen your laptop isn’t one to plan around. Get a written quote from a repair shop with the part and the labour listed separately, then hold it up against one number: the gap between what we pay for the same laptop in Good condition and in Faulty.
We use Good for that comparison, and Excellent doesn’t come into it. A laptop that’s been around long enough to crack its screen carries scuffs and marks on the lid, the palm rest and the base, and a new panel doesn’t take any of those away.
For an HP with an 11th-generation Core i5, that gap is £52.90 today. With a 12th-generation Core i5 it’s £72, and with a 10th-generation one £46. Dell, Lenovo and Asus sit at the same figures. If the written quote comes in well under the gap, repair it first and you’ll end up with more; if it’s over, or close enough that the trip to the shop and the week without a laptop aren’t worth the difference, send it cracked and let the screen be our problem.
Left cracked, that 11th-generation HP is worth £27.60 to us as it stands, with the cracked screen counted. Screens under 15 inches pay less at every grade.
What counts as screen damage on our form
Light scratches don’t make a laptop Faulty. Excellent allows up to three very light scratches on the screen, the kind you only notice with the screen off and a window behind you. More light scratches than that and it’s Good.
Any of these makes it Faulty:
- a crack of any size, or a chip out of the corner or edge
- dead pixels, the dots that stay black or stuck on one colour
- delamination, where the coating or the layers of the panel have started to lift, showing as bubbles or a cloudy patch
- discolouration: a tint, a band or a blotch that shows up on a plain white page
- a failed backlight, where there’s a picture but it’s so dark you need a torch held to the screen to make it out
- scratches deep enough to feel with a fingertip, or that show a rainbow when the light catches them
For the scratch test, run a fingernail across the mark. If the nail catches, choose Faulty.
A screen that stays black with no picture at all, even under a torch, is a different fault. Our guide to a laptop that won’t turn on has a test for telling a dead screen from a dead laptop. And if the marks appeared after a drink went over the keyboard, that’s liquid damage as well, which has its own first steps in the guide to spilled water on a laptop.
Before you send it, and before it gets worse
- Back up now. A crack spreads as the lid flexes, and a screen you can half read today can go black next week. Copy your files to a USB stick or cloud storage while you can still see what you’re doing. If the screen’s already too far gone, plug the laptop into a TV or monitor with an HDMI cable and work from that.
- Don’t press on the crack. Pressure spreads the crack and the dark patches round it. Open and close the lid from the middle of its front edge, gently, and keep it out of a bag where books or a charger press on the lid.
- Tape over it before it goes. A strip of clear parcel tape across the crack holds loose fragments in place and stops them marking the keyboard when the lid shuts. Keep the tape to the front of the screen, clear of the hinges and the ports.
- Wipe it if you can see enough to. With the screen readable, or the laptop on an external monitor, wipe the laptop before you sell it. We wipe every laptop that arrives anyway, but doing it yourself first is still sensible.
A quote over £20 is collected free by DPD on the weekday you choose, and the driver brings a secure box, so the tape is the only packing you do.
When it arrives we check it against the condition you picked. Tell us about the crack and choose Faulty, and there’s nothing for the check to change on that count. If we find something worse than you described, you get a revised offer before we do anything, and if you turn it down we send the laptop back at our cost.
The page on selling a broken laptop covers the rest of the Faulty route. To see how much your laptop is worth with the crack in it, start a quote, pick the processor and choose Faulty.
