What to Do If Your Laptop Screen Cracks

Applies to: Windows 11, Windows 10, macOS
Article Type: Troubleshooting
Last Updated: 2026-08-09

Summary

A cracked laptop screen is a repair, and the order you do things in decides how big a repair it becomes. This article covers the first few minutes — what to stop doing and what not to touch — then how to get your work off the machine, how to tell a broken panel from broken graphics hardware, and what to say when you report it.

Symptoms

• A spiderweb of fine cracks spreading out from a single impact point.
• A dark blot behind the glass that covers more of the screen each day.
• Vertical or horizontal coloured bars that stay in place whatever is on screen.
• Thin lines running down the screen, often a single pixel wide.
• The glass is visibly cracked and the picture underneath is still perfect.
• The picture flickers or cuts out when the lid is moved.
• A touchscreen registers taps nobody made.

In this guide

• 1. Stop Moving the Lid and Leave the Damage Alone
• 2. Decide Whether It Is Safe to Keep Using
• 3. Get Your Work to Safety Before Anything Else
• 4. Run the External-Monitor Test That Says What Actually Broke
• 5. Report It the Same Day If the Laptop Belongs to Your Employer
• 6. Weigh the Repair Against the Machine's Value If the Laptop Is Yours

Before You Start

• Any laptop, work or personal. Nothing to install and no admin rights — every step here is physical handling, saving files, or a conversation.
• An external monitor and its cable, borrowed if necessary. Steps 3, 4 and 6 all use one.
• Another device for reaching your files and reporting the damage — a phone is enough.
• Do not open the case, and do not order a replacement panel yet.

Instructions

1. Stop Moving the Lid and Leave the Damage Alone

A cracked screen is a sheet of glass under tension, and every hinge movement and every finger press extends the crack further.

1. Set the laptop down flat on a desk with the lid open, and leave the lid where it is. Each open-and-close cycle flexes the panel across its full width, which is why a hairline crack on Monday is a spiderweb by Wednesday.
2. Keep your hands off the cracked area. Pressing on it — including tapping a touchscreen through the break — drives broken glass into the layers underneath.
3. Leave the tape in the drawer. Sticky tape, screen protectors and glue applied over a crack pull on the glass as they contract, and they lift the panel's coating away when a technician removes them.
4. Carry the laptop flat with both hands and the lid open if you have to move it at all. Under one arm, in a bag, or held by the lid all put pressure on exactly the wrong place.
5. Do not touch liquid seeping from the break. The screen is a liquid crystal display and the "liquid" is literal — it shows as a dark blot or an oily rainbow smear behind the glass. Lenovo's safety notice for its own laptops is the standard here: if the fluid reaches your eyes or your hands, wash the area with water for at least 15 minutes, and get medical advice if any symptoms remain afterwards.
6. Leave loose glass fragments where they are rather than brushing them away with a bare hand. If any have fallen onto the keyboard, tip them onto a sheet of paper and fold it closed.

2. Decide Whether It Is Safe to Keep Using

A cracked panel that still shows a clean picture will carry you through the next hour; a panel that is bleeding will not.

Work out which of these four you have before you plan anything else:

• Cracked glass, picture intact, nothing spreading. Usable for a short period — long enough to save your work and set up an external monitor. It is not a state to work in for weeks, because the crack keeps travelling and takes more of the picture with it every time the lid moves.
• A dark blot or coloured bars covering more of the screen each time you look. The panel is leaking behind the glass, and this neither stops nor reverses. Move to an external monitor now and get your files off today rather than tomorrow.
• Loose or missing glass, or a lid that no longer sits flat. Stop using the built-in screen. Work from an external monitor only and keep the machine on a desk.
• A cracked touchscreen. A damaged digitiser registers touches nobody made, which is why the cursor jumps or apps open on their own. Use a mouse, keep your fingers off the glass, and read anything the machine does by itself as a symptom rather than something you did.

One more piece of handling: do not close the laptop onto its own keyboard while the glass is broken. The keys press directly against the panel and force fragments inward.

3. Get Your Work to Safety Before Anything Else

Your files are the only part of this that a purchase order cannot replace, so they come first.

1. Find the OneDrive cloud icon — in the notification area at the right-hand end of the Windows taskbar, or at the right-hand end of the menu bar on a Mac. Click it once. The panel that opens states at the top whether syncing has finished, and when it reports that your files are up to date, everything inside your OneDrive folder is already on the server and this laptop no longer holds the only copy.
2. Confirm that from a second device. Sign in at office.com on your phone or another computer and open one of the files you were working on. Seeing today's edits there is the receipt; the sync icon is only the status report.
3. Account for everything outside OneDrive. Files saved to the Desktop, into Downloads, or into any local folder that OneDrive is not backing up exist on this laptop alone. Copy those into your OneDrive folder now, or onto a USB drive.
4. Connect an external monitor if the damage covers enough of the screen that you cannot read it. Windows extends the desktop onto a newly connected monitor on its own, so there is usually a usable second screen before you change any setting. To put the same picture on both, press Windows + P. The Project panel opens at the right-hand edge of the screen with four options in this order — PC screen only, Duplicate, Extend, Second screen only — so move the highlight with the arrow keys to Duplicate and press Enter. How to Set Up Multiple Monitors on Windows covers the connection itself and what to do when the monitor stays black.
5. On a Mac, connect the monitor, then open the Apple menu, choose System Settings (System Preferences on older versions of macOS), and select Displays. That pane lists every connected display and carries the controls for mirroring the laptop screen onto the external one or extending across both. If the entry has moved, type Displays into the search field at the top of the sidebar. How to Connect a Mac to an External Monitor has the cable and adapter detail.
6. Leave the lid open while you work from the external monitor, and leave it at the angle it is already at.

4. Run the External-Monitor Test That Says What Actually Broke

An external monitor separates a broken panel from broken graphics hardware, and mistaking one for the other pays for the wrong repair.

1. Connect the external monitor and send the picture to it alone. On Windows, press Windows + P and select Second screen only, the last entry in the Project panel. On a Mac, use the arrangement controls in the Displays pane to make the external monitor the one in use.
2. Compare what the external monitor shows against what the laptop panel is doing.
3. A clean picture on the external monitor means the panel is the fault. The graphics hardware is producing a correct image and the broken screen is what mangles it. That points at a display replacement, and it is the most common outcome after an impact.
4. The same lines, bars or corruption on the external monitor means the panel is not the fault. The graphics hardware, the display cable or a driver is generating a bad picture, and both screens are showing it faithfully. Dell gives this same test in its own display troubleshooting guidance, and it is worth running even when the crack is obvious — a machine that was dropped can have cracked glass and a graphics fault at once.
5. Write down which of the two you saw. It is the single most useful line in the report, and it stops a service centre replacing a panel that was working.

5. Report It the Same Day If the Laptop Belongs to Your Employer

Accidental damage to a work laptop is routine, there is a process for it, and delay is the only thing that reliably makes it worse.

1. Report it today, in writing, through whatever channel your workplace uses for IT. Give the facts plainly — a technician sizing up the repair needs to know whether it was dropped, whether something hit it, and whether the lid has been closed since.
2. Send wording along these lines: The laptop screen cracked at about 14:20 today - it slid off the edge of my desk onto a hard floor with the lid open. The glass is cracked across the bottom-left corner and a dark patch is spreading from the impact point. An external monitor shows a perfect picture. The laptop is flat on my desk with the lid open and I have not closed it. My files are in OneDrive and synced. How to Submit an Effective IT Support Ticket covers the rest of what a good report carries.
3. Ask three questions in the same message: whether a loaner machine is available, whether accidental damage is covered under your organisation's asset policy, and what to do with the laptop in the meantime.
4. Leave the repair to them. Taking a company laptop to a third-party shop, or fitting a panel bought online, voids the manufacturer's warranty on the whole machine and generally breaches the asset policy you agreed to when you were issued it.
5. Hand the machine over flat and lid open, in a box or bag with space around it rather than pressed against a charger.

Accidental damage is among the most common hardware tickets any help desk handles, alongside spills and dropped machines, and organisations budget for it. What changes the outcome is timing. A crack reported today is a panel swap. The same crack reported in three weeks has spread across more of the screen, has usually shed fragments into the hinge, and arrives with an awkward question about what else happened in between. Reporting it early is what keeps it a small, ordinary event. What to Do If You Spill Liquid on Your Laptop is the same conversation for the other common accident, and What to Do If You Lose Your Work Laptop or Phone covers the version where the machine does not come back at all.

6. Weigh the Repair Against the Machine's Value If the Laptop Is Yours

With no IT department behind you this becomes a commercial decision, and an external monitor is what buys you the time to make it calmly.

1. Check what cover you already hold before paying for anything. A standard manufacturer's warranty covers manufacturing defects rather than accidental damage — Dell states outright that without its optional accidental damage cover, the full cost of a cracked screen falls on the owner, and other makers work the same way. That cover is bought at the time of purchase, so start with the original invoice, then check the maker's support site using the serial number.
2. Check the two places cover hides. Business or contents insurance that lists the laptop as equipment often includes accidental damage, and some credit cards and payment accounts carry purchase protection for a period after the sale.
3. Get a quote before deciding. Give the model and serial number to the manufacturer's service centre and to one independent repair shop, and ask for the price of a full display assembly rather than a bare panel — on most laptops built in the last decade the glass, panel and lid are bonded into a single part.
4. Treat a do-it-yourself replacement as the wrong tool for this job. The display cable routes through the hinge, the panel is glued rather than clipped, and a listing that matches your model number frequently does not match the exact panel fitted to your machine. The usual results are a cracked replacement, a torn cable, and a lid that no longer closes.
5. Compare the quote against what the machine is worth now, not against what you paid for it. A repair costing more than about half the price of replacing the laptop outright rarely wins, and a repair on a machine already near the end of its useful life almost never does. Count the days without it in that comparison — downtime is a real cost in a one-person business.
6. Keep working from the external monitor while you decide. A cracked laptop plugged into a monitor, a keyboard and a mouse is a working desktop computer, and that stopgap costs the price of a cable. It is also the difference between choosing a repair on the numbers and choosing whichever option is fastest.

Troubleshooting

DANGER

Do not touch liquid leaking from a cracked screen, and do not press on the break to test how deep it goes. The fluid inside a liquid crystal display is an irritant — Lenovo's safety notice tells you to wash any that reaches your eyes or hands with water for at least 15 minutes and to seek medical advice if symptoms remain — and pressing on broken glass drives fragments into the layers below, which turns a panel replacement into a larger repair.

Symptom / Error	Potential Cause	Solution
A dark blot spreads further across the screen every few hours	The panel is leaking behind the glass	This neither stops nor reverses. Move to an external monitor (Step 3) and get your files off today.
Fine cracks keep growing days after the impact	Glass under tension, flexed each time the lid moves	Leave the lid open and stop moving it (Step 1), and work from an external monitor until the panel is replaced.
Coloured bars or thin lines that stay put whatever is on screen	Damaged panel or its ribbon connection	Run the external-monitor test in Step 4. A clean external picture means the panel; matching corruption means the graphics side.
The external monitor shows the same corruption	Graphics hardware or the display cable, not the glass	Report it as: The laptop display and an external monitor show identical faults - [describe what you see]. The panel itself is intact. That is a different repair from a screen, and often a cheaper one.
The picture flickers or cuts out when the lid moves	Display cable damaged in the hinge	Leave the lid at one angle and stop adjusting it. Put this in your report — a cable and a panel are different parts at different prices.
The cursor jumps or apps open on their own	Cracked touchscreen registering phantom touches	Use a mouse and keep your fingers off the glass. Ask IT to disable the touch screen device on this laptop, and include the words: "the cracked digitiser is registering touches I am not making."
You cannot read enough of the screen to sign in	Damage covers the sign-in area	Connect the external monitor before powering on — Windows extends the desktop onto it by itself, so the picture is usually waiting for you there once you are signed in. To sign in without reading the laptop panel, press Space, type your password, and press Enter.

Related Articles

• What to Do If You Spill Liquid on Your Laptop
• What to Do If You Lose Your Work Laptop or Phone
• How to Set Up Multiple Monitors on Windows
• How to Connect a Mac to an External Monitor

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