Dell Vostro 1500 - Black Screen

5ingh · 18 Apr 2010 at 19:03

My friends laptop (same as mine!) is having a weird problem with the screen. When the power adaptor is plugged in, the screen is ok for 10-20 seconds, but then it suddenly goes black as if it switched off, however, you can just about see stuff on the screen.

Every time this happens the laptop needs to be rebooted. With the battery plugged in (on its own) there is no problem.

The Fn+arrow keys doesn't have any effect. At first I thought it might be the power adaptor that's causing the issue, but it seems to work fine on my laptop. My power adaptor on his laptop causes the black screen as well..so I'm guessing it must be something hardware related - any ideas? :confused:

Ps. The laptop is out of warranty.

Thanks! :cool:

postmanfw · 18 Apr 2010 at 21:46

Faulty backlight on screen

Strange that it doesnt do it when on the battery though :confused:

5ingh · 19 Apr 2010 at 20:49

Thanks for the reply mate - argh sucks!

Another thing that I've noticed as well is that when the laptop starts, a blue light flashes near top of the screen(on the screen itself). I'm not sure if this has got anything to do with the in built webcam as mine doesn't have one :confused:

So it looks he has to live with the battery, or get the screen replaced

fish99 · 20 Apr 2010 at 18:02

Blue light is indeed the webcam.

JDR82 · 20 Apr 2010 at 18:18

I've seen this happen a lot the backlight may actually be fine, somewhere under the bottom of the screen on the base part should be a little gap with a switch, when the lid is closed ususally theres a tiny part on the screen which then pushes into the gap and hits the switch to turn the backlight off.

However it may be a simple case of the switch being stuck, get a pin or anything small which will fit in the gap and give the switch a prod, hopefully its just clogged with some dust/dirt and will pop out.