The backlight wouldn't turn on after sleep.

Yea, weird problem (and scare) I had this morning when I opened the lid of my lAlienware m15x.

Since I have an alienware I thought this forum would be the most accurate.

Usually I just put my laptop into sleep instead of turning it off. Seems excessive to completely turn it on and off every morning and night when I pretty much use it all through the day.

Well this morning I opened the lid and the backlight for the LCD didn't come on. It was the backlight because if I looked close enough I could see the windows login screen.

After some panic my first thought is to just restart the computer. So I sign back in hit start and squint until I find restart and do so. The computer restarts and comes back with the same thing.

So now I'm slightly more distraught and want to shut it off completely. Unfortunately I can't see the screen enough to do so. Eventually I was able to put it into hibernation with a combination of esc and ctrl+alt+del (unfortunately I don't know vista well enough for the bail method from the login screen )

When it turned back on from fresh power and not a restart it was working again.

Anyone have any idea what happened?

 

I too use sleep all the time on my M17x.. I have experienced similar issues.. All seems to be software related to me with the re enabling of the lcd..

you can always hit windows key and then type in shutdown.exe and press enter or shutdown -r for restart.. something along those lines.. Not in front of it to get exact typing.. I had to do this on my M17x when the display came on but blank screen.. Kinda like the output was on a second monitor but no external was hooked up.. so i had to do that to get it to restart as I forgot to change my power button to shutdown rather than put in sleep mode.



Seems like the lcd just wasnt beeing powered properly.. possible driver issue ..

keep monitoring it to see if it happens more and more frequent.. could be signs of hardware failure .... I dont think this is the case at the moment..

 

I read a bit about it and it seems two likely things.

From what happened to me it seems more likely it's a software/driver issue. The computer started to shut down but went into sleep in the middle of the shutdown process. The computer thinks the screen is turned off but the computer was still of course, running. This left the LCD stuck in a state of off because computer aren't smart.

I have it set to go to sleep when I close the lid. The optimist in my is hoping it was just a glitch in the software, and that it won't happen again.

 

I am experiencing the same issue where the display wont' turn on after the system has just woken up from a sleep. I don't know why. I usually just turn the system off manually by holding power.

kilthro, when you hit windows and type shutdown.exe, are you doing this while the screen is out- relying that what's you've typed is correct?

 

Well there are two situations that I have experienced in do this.

1) the no back light or screen visible at all. Kinda like no output given to the LCD whatsoever. So either the video cards did not initialize properly or something didn't wake back up right. If I hit power button or close lid nothing more happens. The only thing is that FX lights are on. So basically computer is locked up as nothing works.
For this I have to hold the power button in and turn off the system by a forced shutdown.


2) The back light comes on but cant see anything but cursor or if the back light is off, but you can hold a flashlight up to it and see an image, I have done what I explained above. The difference here is that if I closed the lid, or hit the power button it would enter sleep again. Then if I opened the lid it would wake up and all I could see is the cursor.
I just hit the windows key and since the cursor immediately goes into the prompt box at the bottom of the menu, I type in the shutdown command. I knew it worked when I seen the HDD lights start flashing and then heard the sounds of it shutting down.. I also made sure last night I changed the behavior for the power button when pressed. Rather than put it into sleep, i have it shutdown the system.

 

its because windos sucks .....