Any Studio 1555 owners still around? Screen won't turn on, please help

Hey everyone, so I was using my laptop last night, nothing high load, just homework, and I put it to sleep. When I woke it back up, the hard drive sounded like it spun up, but the display would not come on. It didn't come on after a hard reset either. I tried hitting the external monitor button to see if maybe it had just switched, but still nothing. Tried plugging in an external monitor, nothing.

It turns off after hitting power for a second, not 10 seconds, so I don't think it's even booting into Windows.

The interesting thing is if I boot it holding D for dell diagnosis, the screen flashes through a number of colors before going blank, so it may not be the display cable, and maybe a lower chance of it being the GPU.

Ideas?

 

That. So try booting from DVD or usb, might be time for a new hdd or, because of its age and the diagnostics refusing to run, a new cmos battery.

 

Are you able to get into BIOS? Boot menu? If you can't even get that far without it shutting off, the motherboard is probably fried?

 

I've seen plenty of HDDs go, and they've never prevented the BIOS screen from showing up. Its a newer drive than the laptop, and it's health was always reported as 100% by HD Sentinel at any rate. Same with the new OS suggestion, hard to do if I can't see anything but black

New CMOS battery is worth a try.

Maybe. To be specific it does not turn off, it just stays on with the hard drive whirring but nothing on screen, and shuts down if I hit power for a second, indicating it never gets into Windows.

 

So what would it mean when going into Dell diagnostics holding D, the screen flashes between pure tones of grey, green, red, blue, purple, etc? If the video card was shot I would expect lines or corruption in the image, but they are flat pure tones.

 

This sounds exactly like the problem I had with my 1558 a few months ago. It was a bad motherboard (gpu) . Holding d while booting ran the test successfully, but bios and os were initially all distorted with patterns and/or lines, and after a few days just a blank screen.

I was under warranty so I got a new laptop ( http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=754204), so if you have warranty too then you can try their technical support lines. If not you could look for a replacement motherboard online, or better still get a new laptop.

 

This tanker is 5 years old, well out of warranty (and not worth even a dell diagnostic). Now, I think we have a similar problem, but perhaps with an interesting twist. To explain:

After I tried a new CMOS battery to no avail, I figured I had nothing left to lose. I noticed the machine did get warm to hot if I left it on for a while. I thought the issue may be like the early Xbox 360s which would fluxuate with heat and eventually solder or some circuits would crack and break the connection, which could temporarily be fixed by superheating them and reflowing the solder through variously ghetto methods.

So i did the same thing with the laptop, having little to lose. Wrapped it in a towel, left it on for a few hours. Lo and behold, eventually it started beeping (which I couldn't get it to do before even without RAM in it). The fan also finally started spinning, it should have well before that as it was scorching hot. So I reboot it at this point, and success! It boots! I got everything I wanted off it. After rebooting after that, it stopped turning on again, but another round of heating and it's been working for quite a few boots now.

So I think your issue was an actual GPU corruption as you saw lines where I see none, the image is still perfect. I think mine was more the motherboard around the GPU or between it and the CPU, a circuit or solder in there somewhere may have cracked with heat fluctuations, and heating it temporarily fixed it. Perhaps a professional reflow with a heat gun would fix it for longer. For now I'm just happy to have everything off it, I'm still expecting it to die soon.

 

Ah, that's good

Well mine was around 4 years old too, and served me well while it worked. I just lucked out with the warranty, as I had decided to purchase the 5 year warranty. But decent laptop, lovely display and keyboard. I definitely miss the myriad of ports it came with, especially the three 3.5mm audio ports. Let us know what your next laptop will be

 

Yeah, early in its life I had the 720p display that flickered a bit on greys, so Dell was nice enough to upgrade me to the 1080P LED display for free (in 3 days shipped both ways - who says their CS is bad? ) . It's still gorgeous, from a normal distance it basically looks retina-ey, with perfectly smooth font. Now I was thinking about a 13" MBA to replace it, but it would be a bit of a shame to me having to have a pixels per inch downgrade going to it. I don't like any successive computer being a downgrade in any aspect
Also with the hybrid hard drive I put in it, it's still plenty peppy for casual use. Shame that it's still occasionally not booting, needing the heat treatment again, otherwise it may make a great donation.

Ah well. I'm sure it's at least better calibrated, to somewhat make up for the PPI difference. And it's kind of incredible that something that small will have about double the CPU performance and triple the GPU performance as this, and at the same time some incrediballs 11 hour battery life compared to the 2 this still gets (which is impressive in its own right, I've seen laptop batteries die much faster, including macs with the supposed 1000 charge cycles) .