DIY CCFL Inverter circuit

[kcghost]

The backlight (CCFL) on my laptop LCD screen is dim, and after some research I found its usually the inverter board at fault.
I could buy a replacement board, but that wouldn't be very fun and its not worth it for this laptop. If possible I would like to only use electronics I already have in my house.
I don't care about dimming capability, I just need it bright.

Before finding out many details, I went ahead and took apart the laptop screen and a standard CFL bulb.
I had assumed at the time that the electronics that drive a CFL would be the same or similar enough to drive a CCFL.
The plan was to just take out the CCFL inverter board, and wire up 120 volts to the CFL circuit to drive the pins that were previously the output of the inverter board.
However the CCFL is driven by two pins, the CFL is driven by four (two on each side of the tube).

How far off was I in my assumption? Is it possible to use the CFL electronics to drive the CCFL?
What modifications do I have to make?
Can I just hook up one of the pair of outputs to the CCFL input? (I doubt that, but its worth asking)

If using the CFL circuit is not the best option, are there any other ways to hack up a cheap CCFL inverter circuit?

Thanks in advance for any help.

[SeanB]

Not likely to be the inverter board on an older laptop, more likely the tube itself. The tube is available as a part ( eBay or RS) and is fiddly to install but doable.

[Alana]

CCFL's need much more voltage to start up than heated 4 pin ones. I think computer CFL backlight works on around 1kV [dont try to mesure it yourself - i fried a DMM when i wanted to mesure such circut]. Read about it here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCFL_inverter

And from my personal expirience with PC and laptop stuff - usually its the CCFL that craps out first so if you managed to disasemble your laptop's screen try finding replacement. Mechanically damaged LCD's are best source for CCFL blubs.

[amyk]

A CFL is just a regular hot-cathode fluorescent lamp that's been packaged together with a ballast. They rely on filaments at each end of the tube to heat the electrodes to emission temperature, whereas CCFLs just need the inverter to supply enough voltage to strike the glow discharge.