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I have successfully revived the new laptop. Unfortunately, the spare lid and panel I received (for a different model) has a different mounting system, a straight panel/inverter swap was out of the question. Where the original panel is more inset to the lid with the mounting tabs on the glass side with standoffs extending from the back of the lid, the the new panel is flat on the rear of the lid with mounting tabs on the backlight side.
After assessment and a bit of testing I decided to fit the whole spare back lid to the laptop. Some modification was required. I had to modify the hinge mounting plates to fit the hole arrangement in the laptop and remove some of the plastic molding in places.
The machine was left running with a small stick of RAM running memtest with the screen on. Later in the day I returned and found it had passed successfully several times. I then removed the harddrive and RAM from my old laptop and fitted it to the new laptop.
If I had been running Windows on the original laptop, this probably would have posed a problem, thankfully I have Fedora 13 on it. The old laptop is intel based, the new AMD based. All that was required initially was to switch xorg over to the VESA driver temporarily until the machine came up on the new laptop and had the propriety ATI binary drivers installed. It "just works". Nice.