Black laptop Screen

[Scott M]

Wife's laptop screen just went black. Any ways to check and see if it's shot? It's not even dim, just black.

[delcecchi]

Someone didn't hit the function key that turns off the screen did they?

[LMITOUT]

That's the first thing I thought of too but you'd have to hit two keys to do that. Unlikely, but a cheap fix if that's what happened.

[LMITOUT]

If the laptop is still on, try holding the Fn key and tapping the key that looks like one of these:

[CAMAN]

On my Dell laptop it's "Fn"+"F8-Crt/LCD" incase yours doesn't have any buttons that look like what Lmit posted.

Otherwise it is possible the connections for the screen can break or come loose.

Does the laptop seem like it boots up properly?

[Scott M]

Tried hooking it up to an external monitor and hit fn+f8...no go. My laptop works just fine when plugging in but I think hers is shot. She was ready to junk it a couple months ago before I cleaned it up for her, so it's probably time.

[spearchucker]

Probably the inverter board that runs the backlight for the screen. If you get the light just right you should be able to see if you can see an image on the black screen. If you can, the screen is good and the backlight or inverter board that runs the backlight is bad. I replaced on on my HP laptop for $20. They just plug in.

[DTro]

If you cannot get it to display on an external monitor, then you have some other boot related issue.

What is the booting sequence like? Is your power light on? HDD light on? Is the HDD light flashing like it is loading? Any keyboard lights?

If none of this is happening you could have a power supply issue.

[upnorth]

Like DTro alluded to it may not be booting. Check the lights, and once you think it is up, press the CAPS lock key to see if that indicator lights up. If not it is either not coming up at all or freezing somewhere on the boot up process.

One things that never hurts with laptops is to unplug the power and pull the battery and let it sit for a couple minutes. I have seen them in the past do something similar and it was stuck in some sort of a sleep/hibernate mode.

[Nick Kuhn]

The advice from others is pretty solid, look for indicator lights, listen for fans/hard drive activity, see if you can get any sound out of it. If it is older it may not make much sense monetarily to repair it.

[Scott M]

upnorth gets *tech cred* Pulled the battery out and put it back and it worked. It's probably a matter of time before we need to get rid of it though, so it's on life number 7 or 8 now.

[upnorth]

Good to hear it worked. I know it seems kinda lame, but they do get stuck in a sleep/hibernate state now and then.