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    totally black screen during POST

    Discussion in 'Dell' started by bvanevery, Aug 10, 2010.

  1. bvanevery

    bvanevery Newbie

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    I have a Dell Inspiron 1720 with 17" screen and NVIDIA 8600M GT video card. Recently I took my laptop camping and used a PWR+ DC-DC adapter to charge it. It worked fine for about 2 weeks, then my laptop refused to recognize my DC-DC adapter anymore. It will power the laptop, but the 2GHz CPU is throttled to 800MHz and the battery won't charge. I came home to figure out what's going on and order new parts. Turns out my 3rd party 90W AC-DC brick is not recognized anymore either. I have not tried an official Dell brick yet, but I surmise that the laptop DC input is probably belly up.

    I took the laptop apart trying to see what I could do about it. Finding nothing I could mess with, I put it back together again. I also tried to clean the DC input with rubbing alcohol and a wooden toothpick. The wooden bit broke off inside, and in my impatience I jammed a small sewing pin in there to try to clear it out. I think I must have succeeded as I was able to work the pin all the way through the component and out the other side, like it's designed to be a tunnel, but maybe I damaged something. Dunno, starting to not care anymore. These Dell proprietary charging systems are s*** and I'll never buy a Dell laptop again. Due to funds I'm stuck with trying to fix this one meanwhile though.

    Now my laptop displays a totally black screen during POST. No cursor, no nothing. If there are no error messages, and I wait long enough, POST will complete, I'll get the Windows cursor, the Windows startup logo, the login prompt, and no problemo. Screen works just fine as long as I'm in Windows, it's only during POST that it's black. Or when coming out of Hibernate. If I attach a 2nd monitor I do have video on that monitor, so the video card itself is ok. I can't see any faint image on laptop screen during POST.

    Any suggestions? Is it an indirect consequence of frying the DC input? Did I do a bad job of putting my laptop back together, should I take apart my laptop screen and jiggle something? Have I got a weird BIOS issue? I did flash back to A08 and then up again to A09, hoping that would help something, but it didn't.
     
    bvanevery, Aug 10, 2010
    #1