Its a mates laptop running Windows 95, was working fine till today. She turned it on this morning and the screen was black - no picture. You can hear the hard drive spinning inside but the screen is just blank. I went round and tried connecting the laptop from the Monitor out socket into a spare monitor - still no picture. Any clue what the problem could be?
You sure she wasn't playing with the display settings and hasn't told you? Older laptops are very picky and if the refresh rate has been pushed too far will just shut off their displays with no warning. This is what happened when my brother decided to play with my dads laptop, we had to take out the HDD and link it with my PC to salvage the data and then reinstall windows when it was put back in the laptop.
I just called her and she said she didn't mess about with the display settings. I don't know if the problem's in Windows because nothing is displayed at all not even the boot-up screens as soon as its turned on. It's blank from the moment it's switched on. Did that happen on yours too?
You said the hard drives spins up but does the hd led flash for a while to indicate that windows is loading?
It may well be a problem with the hardware which is what I told her. The screen doesn't light up at all, it's like the screen is turned off somehow, maybe the mechanism to turn it on is broken? what makes it stranger is that it doesn't display anything when I plugged it into a external (working) monitor either.
could it be she had hit some keys that turn off the monitor display function or the display set to always off.
is it possible for that to happen? i'll ask her today, but she said before that nothing out of the ordinary happened, she just shut down as usual, next day she turned it on and the screen looked like batmans ass..
Ok I've just discovered from another site that there is apparently an "FN" key that could have been pressed which causes the laptop to change it's display output from Internal, None, External. Has anyone heard of this? I'm going round there either today or tomorrow to try this..
If you're going to try that with the Fn-key, you will have to press and hold the Fn-key and then press a key with a picture of a screen (probably one of the number keys or function keys (f1---)) It could also be the backlighting, since the screen doesn't light up at all. If so, you can try to take the screen in to a light room, and try to see an image on the screen (it'll be almost impossible to see, but you can see it). Then you'll have to change the cathode.
Yes ... in Toshiba laptops it is Fn+F5 .... Check the brand of the laptop and see what combo that brand uses
I think it is an old Toshiba.. whats the procedure just press te FN key at power up and then press F5?
Let it power up ... then press Fn and F5 simultaneously. Each time you press it, it move through, built in display, external monitor, both and no display.
