way to tell if your MacBook is dead

weirdness ocurred this morning - I had turned my laptop off last night and now any attempts to turn it back on are met with a black screen. I've put the os disk in and heard whirls but the monitor is behaving like it's stuck in sleep mode. Before I assume it's a hardware error has anyone had this problem before? I've had a black screen that doesn't respond to mode movements to wake up but never one that's persisted through a reboot

I should add that it seemed active (eg caps light on etc) when I put the os disk in. Before that it seemed not to be booting. And now the os disk is I'm and it's been restarted it's again dead. Eject does nothing, no cd noises and so on. Like it's locked into sleep mode

 

I had a similar issue, but it turned out to be my fault. What I did was instead of turn off my machine, I dimmed the screen brightness all the way down. When I came back later, I hit the power button, but nothing came on. It wasn't until I tried turning up the brightness that I realized what I had done.

 

Shine some light onto the screen with a flash light or something to check if it's just the backlight thats dead on it.

 

seems more like problems with the operating system. It's just not starting - the light comes on but beyond that it doesn't power up out of a kind of sleep mode.

Looks like it will need a service (if I'm not on warranty can anyone recommend a uk based repairer?)

 

You can bring it to an Apple Store first, even though you may be out of warranty, usually the staff are really good and will still help you figure out what sort of problem it is. They probably won't repair it for you if its hardware, since you're out of warranty, but at least you can figure out if it is a hardware problem or maybe just something with the OS which is easier to fix.

 

Aye looks like the screen is dead - or at least a connection is loose and it's not turning on.

In general if I opened the laptop the 'sleep mode' light would still be on, and only a hard DRAM reset or the initial insert of a CD would force it to wake up. After that I could turn on the caps or num lock and hear sounds of cheerful bleeping when I turned the volume up and down.

Sadly that was about it - as far as it's concerned the case is closed so I'm assuming there must be a loose connection.

Spoke to a local apple shop - I'm not under warranty so it's a 60 quid assessment fee and then he told me to expect another couple of hundred quid after that and possibly 7-10 working days. That bit was painful - my gf's dell xps broke down 2 days earlier and I phoned them about it. The next day a dell repairer was around at my office replacing both the motherboard and memory for free.