Toshiba Satellite 1800 laptop, the display is blank but works when hooked up to an external monitor.

Here’s a ques­tion we recently received. My Toshiba Satel­lite 1800 lap­top dis­play is blank but it works when hooked up to an exter­nal mon­i­tor. There’s any num­ber of things that could cause this issue. So we’ll try to cover every­thing we think would cause this issue.

1. The first ques­tion we’d ask is, was the oper­at­ing sys­tem recently rein­stalled? If so do you have the cor­rect dri­vers installed for the system?

2. The sec­ond thing we would look at is the dis­play itself. While the screen may be blank it can still be dis­play­ing an image. Take a flash­light and shine it at an angle to the screen. If you can see the “shadow” of your screen, and your mouse mov­ing around, the prob­lem is most likely a LCD back­light prob­lem, or an LCD inverter prob­lem. If the back­light went out sud­denly, its typ­i­cally the inverter. If the light faded over time, its typ­i­cally the actual back­light. See­ing that an exter­nal mon­i­tor works, this is more than likely the answer to your problem.

3. If you can’t see a “shadow” of your dis­play and you haven’t taken your com­puter apart, and you haven’t rein­stalled your OS. Then it’s most likely not a dis­play issue. The next step is to diag­nose the video card. This is a lit­tle more in depth, but in most cases, if a video card is sus­pected to be the prob­lem, it should sim­ply be replaced. This doesn’t apply to all lap­tops. Most lap­top moth­er­boards use inte­grated video cards.

Hope­fully this was help­ful. If you have any fol­low up ques­tions, please feel free to ask.

Jan 11, 2009 | Computer Repair and Networks | Leave A Comment »