AKICILJ: Black screen on laptop computer

[carbonel]

My laptop is in some sort of weird mode that I can't get it out of. Or it's broken. When I boot it up, it says it's "resuming" -- I left it unplugged over the weekend in hopes that it would go into totally off mode, but that didn't do it.

What I get is a black screen (not dead, but video black) with a functional cursor. No icons, no toolbar, no start button. Nothing else.

Pressing Ctrl-Alt-Del does nothing. If I press the on/off switch, when it starts up it appears to be an orderly resume, and when it shuts off, it says "hibernating..." But in between, it's totally unusable.

Any idea if this is an operating system problem, a virus, or something weird? If it's an OS problem, it probably needs to go back to Sony and get the OS reinstalled -- a major pain, since everything else need to be reinstalled, not to mention pricy, since it's long out of warranty. If it's a virus, it should probably go to the Geek Squad. If it's a very small boat anchor, that would be useful to know, since the computer dates from the early days of XP -- seven or eight years old, that would make it, and I don't know how much money is worth throwing at it.

Advice appreciated.

Comments

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

take the battery out, unplug it, leave it for ten minutes. plug it back in, put the battery back in, boot it up.

if it's an os issue, that should fix it, or at least get it to a place where it throws more useful error messages.

[carbonel]

Well, 10 minutes didn't do it, possibly because it has some kind of minimal built-in battery. But thanks, that's a great suggestion, and I'll see if overnight does the trick.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Is the screen brightness turned off?

K.

[carbonel]

No. The cursor looks fine, as do the boot up and boot down screens. So it's not a display issue, except in that nothing useful is displaying.

[sraun]

When it's powered up with the black screen and functional cursor, push the power button down and hold it down for about 15 seconds - do not let go until the system starts to power down. Then it should shut down without saying "hibernating". Power it back up afterwards, and everything should be normal.

[carbonel]

Bingo! Thank you -- you just saved me at least $100.

I figured it had to be something subtle but simple like that.

[sraun]

You're welcome!

I probably run into a similar situation every 2-3 months at work.

The hint was Resuming & Hibernating - it was saving and restarting the broken state. You needed to force the hardware to just shut down without Hibernating - that's what holding down the power button does. This also works if your Windows locks up tight - normally the hardware says to the OS 'can I shut down now?', holding the power button down long enough tells the hardware 'I don't care what the software thinks, just toss it out and shut down'.

I tell people to do it for a locked up Windows more like weekly.

[carbonel]

So I was on the right track when I let it sit unplugged over the weekend -- I just didn't know the correct fix.

[sraun]

Yep!

[also-huey.livejournal.com]

That's a good general solution, but seems BIOS-dependent. A more generic solution would be: while it is running, unplug it and then drop the battery. It should wake up, chkdsk itself, and then boot normally.

[sraun]

It's been a standard feature of the Wintel PC power supply since sometime in the early 2000's. I have a marker for it, but it's not necessarily a useful one - the standard motherboard <> power supply connector changed sometime around then. As near as I can tell, that's when this feature went into effect. I haven't seen a Wintel PC since at least 2005 that it didn't work with.