Is my screen dieing?

[nachamiyahu]

Ive got an old dell inspiron E1505 and last night i was using it and suddenly the screen just died. I figured maybe it happened bcuz of overheating so i just turned it on and off and it seemed ok. But then as soon as i got onto firefox in ubuntu it did it again. So I went to sleep and got up and turned the laptop on. It loaded fine and I was just about to get on firefox and it did it again. So i booted to windows just to see if it was an ubuntu issue, and seeing no problems i hit restart in windows, and guess what happened? The screen went black. So I restarted it and was about to run a system Diagnstic and now the computer will hang in POST and then restart and then hang in POST. It's go a new hard drive in it and new ram as well as new DVD drive. So is it the screen dieing or is it something internal like the mobo?

 

[hang-the-9]

Could be either of those. Run it with an external monitor and see what happens.

 

[nachamiyahu]

I tried using an external monitor. And it worked for about 5 minutes until the screen went black again and so did the external monitor. the screen on the laptop was very dark, barely readable.

 

[dextermat]

Hi,

Sad news your gpu/mobo is faulty:

It might be just time and heat that killed it

 

[nachamiyahu]

Thats what i figured. The laptop is probably from 2005, so its lasted quite a while.

 

[hang-the-9]

The issue may be that the external screen swapped back to the laptop screen. If you can see an image on the LCD but it's dim, it may not be the motherboard or the video card but either the inverter or backlight on the screen. Run the laptop only on the external monitor. Turn it on, and soon as you do that, close the lid. You'll need an external keyboard and mouse to use it then. The laptop should see that the monitor is the primary display and send the image to it. See if it stays on. If it does, you need to look into repairing your screen, an inverter is cheap and pretty quick, a backlight or a new screen you may want to look into getting another laptop then.

 

[nachamiyahu]

I tried it and it works while running windows XP but not while running Ubuntu. How can I narrow it down to the inverter or the backlight/new screen?

 

[hang-the-9]

Take a look here http://www.laptoprepair101.com/laptop/2007/01/31/replace-screen-inverter-fix-backlight/

It's funny, but seems laptop from around that year have this issue, I see a lot of T41,42,43 IBM laptops with this same issue.

 

[nachamiyahu]

hahaha i was just looking at that article. idk if i feel comfortable removing the inverter. cuz with this dell ive gotta remove the keyboard, etc etc etc. and i've already put alot of money into this laptop (new HD, ram, dvd drive.) idk if i wanna put anymore into it lol. reminds me of an old car.