The first major improvement I've made is by replacing the backlight, thought others might like to see how much improvement can be had. The service manual for the E4433B shows how to get to the backlight but says you must disconnect all the wires going to the front panel; I did it by only disconnecting the hard coax output connector and the 2 wire connector that feeds the backlight, you can then carefully lean the front panel unit forwards so it rests face down and then take off the aluminum back plate and get at the display.
My backlight looked weak and greenish and the system menus told me it had run for almost 60,000 hours. I took the backlight out and measured the size of the ccfl tube at 3 x 110 mm. There's a company called ccfl warehouse (
www.ccflwarehouse.com) that sell a 3 x 112 mm ccfl for $10 plus another $5 for shipping - the official part from Agilent costs $260 - yes the new one is 2 mm longer but there's plenty of room so it fits. When the new ccfl arrived, I cut the wires off the old ccfl, cleaned up and tinned the wire ends, prepped the new ccfl by carefully bending the wires, cutting them back, and tinning them so they matched the old one. Then I soldered the wires to the new ccfl and put it back in the slot reusing the old insulating caps.
On power up, the new ccfl took about 30 seconds to reach full brightness and the difference was huge, after tweaking the contrast and brightness, my display looked almost like the glossy pictures for the ESG when it was new - see the pictures in the next post.