Help please! P150em 7970m black screen on startup

I recently bought a P150em with 7970m, and I am having some intermittent display issues.

Every so often windows will boot up but will show a completely blank screen instead of the login screen. I can hear the boot sounds, and I can press enter to login, but nothing appears, no taskbar, no mouse cursor, just a completely black screen (though I can tell the screen backlight is on).

Ctrl + Alt + Del does nothing (well it probably does something, but I can't see it due to the black screen!)

Any ideas what is going on here? It's not every time, but could happen 3 times in a row then it could work on the 4th boot up. I'm suspecting the switchable graphics...

Info :

OS: Windows 7 Prem Home x64
Intel i7-3610QM
AMD Radeon HD 7970M 2GB
128GB Crucial M4 mSata SSD
750GB Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid Drive
15.6 Inch 1080p 95% Gamut Premium Matte Display

Display Driver version : 8.951.6.0

Update : from testing it seems that the problem doesn't happen when restarting, only from a cold boot... weird.... :-/

 

Sounds like a driver issue.
Or...maybe a faulty display connector.
Here is what you need to do:
1.) evaluate as best you can when this issue occurs. Flip the panel up and down, restart a couple of times, see when this happens
2.) write down what you found out in a word document (or wordpad or notepad)
3.) contact your reseller, send the unit back, send them the file with the description of the problem and demand a NEW unit to be shipped back to you.

This is my advice

 

You can try booting the laptop using safemode and do a recovery from there, or maybe its a gpu connection issue, but im just guessing :/

 

Thanks for the responses

I don't think it's a dodgy connection because the windows logo always shows fine before it happens, it's just the login screen where it goes blank.

It definitely looks software related rather than hardware. Once it boots up successfully everything runs fine on both GPUs, the problem is only seen at startup.

I guess I might have to send it back, it just sucks because I've just got everything set up how I wanted it!

 

have you tried doing a recovery? course it might be something that you have installed thats causing the problem.

 

I've tried restoring to the earliest restore point but it didn't fix it.

 

Hi Paul, what is the status of your problem? I got exactly same problem as yours. One day, i started the laptop(m17xr3) and there is oly black screen. However, i can hear the windows login after facial recognition software running. Meaning the laptop is in operation except the display is black.

 

had this 3-4 weeks ago. after 3 os restores it finaly worked.
mine turned out to be a dodgy windows update.

when you said both gpu's do you mean sli or dedi and intergrated. : as you have 2 graphics cards it might be worth turning of sli (or whatever ati call two)

did you get a windows operating system dvd
if so put it in and boot up and click on repair to see if that comes up with the cause.

 

I fixed it with a windows reinstall, but I think it's driver related be because it happened again while trying out some new VGA drivers.

There was a crash during the catalyst driver install and when I rebooted the black screen came back. This time I fixed it by booting to safe mode and doing a clean reinstall of both the intel and amd stock VGA drivers.

MrDJ, I meant dedi & integrated - I don't have sli ( i'm curious, can you even sli in a p150em?)

 

You can't do dual gpu, but there might be a model soon that can.

 

truly doubt so, there aint enough space for 2 gpu in the 150em