E5-575 black screen, 3.5 year old laptop

gabriel21

Bought this E5-575-5476 laptop 3.5 years ago. Now the screen stays black.

Here are the details: When I boot, you can see that light is being emitted from the screen, but the pixels stay black. Even in a pitch black room, I don't see anything on the screen. I tried with an external monitor and everything works fine, except for the laptop's screen which stays black. In Windows settings, the laptop screen isn't even in the monitor choices. Very rarely when I boot the laptop, the screen does turn on normally, like if the laptop's screen had no issues, and I can use it without any external monitor.

Anyone has a guess as to what the issue is, backlight, ribbon cable, the screen itself? If it's an easy fix I could do it myself instead of bringing it in for repair.

aphanic

As I was reading your post I was thinking "failed backlight maybe?", but then I got to this part:

gabriel21 said:

Very rarely when I boot the laptop, the screen does turn on normally, like if the laptop's screen had no issues, and I can use it without any external monitor.

So I understand it works sometimes? Seldom, but works, and that makes me think there's a problem in the connection. Maybe the cable connecting the screen to the motherboard is loose. It could be interesting to open up the laptop to see if there's anything wrong with that cable, disconnect it and plug it again (check if it's damaged as well).

I'm no expert whatsoever, but I'd expect a broken backlight to never turn on, but because the backlights are LED powered nowadays who knows, maybe some malfunctioning component is making it fail to light up.

Best of luck!