Laptop screen diagnosis thread

In My Humble Opinion
1

My wife’s laptop is a really old Toshiba Satellite (A205 S5855).

She turned it on this morning to a black screen.

I think the OS is loading, because there is considerable hard drive reading for several seconds which then slows down considerably, just as when the machine loads up the OS in the normal course of events. (Windows 7.) Moreover once it has reached that state where it seems to have loaded up, pushing “ctrl-alt-del” caused more drive reading to happen, which again I take as an indicator that the OS is loaded. It’s just not displaying on the screen.

I plugged the machine into an external monitor, but nothing appeared on either monitor. I tried powering down and restarting, still nothing. I tried powering down, restarting and immediately closing the laptop lid–still nothing. There’s an Fn key that looks like, from the icon, it’s supposed to switch the display from screen to monitor and back. Tried it–nothing.

So are there any possible DIY fixes here or is it probably something gone wrong deep in the dark dusty innards of this thing?

2

So the laptop’s monitor is just blank? Is it blank with the backlight on or is it blank like when the laptop is off?

You could try resetting its RAM if you are comfortable doing it.

3

Completely blank, no backlight.

Out of curiosity, why might resetting the RAM be relevant?

4

Well nothing is showing in both the internal and external monitors but the laptop appears to be loading up so it seems like a memory problem to me.

Try removing the battery and pressing the power button for 30 seconds. I still recommend resetting the RAM.

5

What he’s saying is that, if there is a memory problem, the monitor will never turn on. I’ve seen those issues with a bad stick of RAM.

But the hard drive doesn’t usually spin up in that case.

6

I had a similar issue and googled black screen with the model number and got directions to remove the battery and reinstall and that did the trick.