You open the laptop, the lights come on, you can hear the fan, but the screen is black or so dim you can barely make it out. This looks alarming and usually is not. In most cases the computer is running perfectly well and something has gone wrong between the computer and the picture.
Work through these in order. They take about two minutes.
Try this first
- Turn the brightness up. On the top row of the keyboard, find the two keys with a small sun symbol, usually around F1 and F2. Press the brighter one about ten times. On many laptops you have to hold the Fn key at the bottom left while you press them. A brightness setting knocked to zero by a stray keypress is the most common cause of this whole problem.
- Check the automatic brightness setting. Some laptops have a light sensor that dims the screen in a dark room and occasionally gets it badly wrong. Click Start, type brightness, open Display settings, and if you see an option about changing brightness automatically when lighting changes, switch it off.
- Make sure the picture is not being sent somewhere else. If the laptop was recently plugged into a monitor, a dock or a meeting-room projector, Windows may still be sending the picture there. Hold the Windows key and press P. A small menu appears on the right, though you may not be able to see it. Press the down arrow once and then Enter to choose Duplicate. If nothing changes, press Windows + P again, then down arrow twice and Enter, and so on through the four options. One of them will bring the picture back to the laptop screen.
- Wake it out of a stuck sleep. Press a few ordinary keys, move the mouse, then close the lid, count to five, and open it again. A machine that went to sleep while it was doing something can occasionally wake with the screen still switched off.
- Do a proper power off. Hold the power button down for about ten seconds until the machine goes completely quiet and all the lights go out. Wait thirty seconds, then press the power button once. Anything unsaved will be lost, but this clears the great majority of stuck-screen faults.
The torch test
If the screen is still black, this tells you which of two very different problems you have.
Turn on your phone torch, hold it close to the screen at an angle, and look carefully for the Windows sign-in screen or a desktop faintly visible under the light. Move the torch around a little.
If you can see a faint image, the computer is running normally and the backlight (the lamp behind the screen that makes it visible) has failed. That is a screen repair, and importantly your files are all fine.
If there is nothing at all under the torch, the machine may not be starting properly, or it may not be producing a picture. That is a different fault and we will need to look at it.
Either way, take a photo of what you see and send it with your ticket.
If that didn't fix it
If you have a spare monitor or a television with an HDMI socket, plug the laptop into it. If a picture appears on the external screen, the computer is fine and the problem is the laptop display. That single test saves us a lot of time, so mention the result when you log the ticket.
Also tell us whether the power light and keyboard backlight come on, whether you can hear the fan, and whether anything happened just before it started, such as a drop, a spill, or the lid being closed on a pen.
Still stuck?
Log a ticket at portal.yougrowit.com.au or email support@yougrowit.com.au. If it is stopping you working right now, call 03 9028 4358.
Support hours are Monday to Friday, 8:30am to 5:30pm Melbourne time, excluding Victorian public holidays.
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