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After putting my laptop in sleep mode, there is completely blank screen (like display is not connected to cpu). I shut down my laptop and restart but my screen remains blank. Nothing shows on the screen.

Everything is OK. CPU, battery, loading of os, fan. There is no problem with any of that. Actually I can't see any thing on screen only it is black. After loading OS I write my password then I can hear the start up sound but I can't see anything.

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2 Answers 2

Depending on the age of your laptop, it might be the fluorescent bulb that back lights the laptops screen. I had this fail on on old Thinkpad several years ago. I was able to replace it myself, but it is not an easy task for a novice to attempt themselves.

Here's a youtube video that demonstrates how to replace this bulb on a Dell laptop. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w4v20PyomuU

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I highly doubt this would be due to a faulty backlight. If it was, it was not always coincide with resuming from a particular power state. The OP specifically says it happens when resuming from sleep. –  Austin ''Danger'' Powers Apr 7 '13 at 17:21
He also says that he does restarts and the problem continues. Without more input from the OP this is just as reasonable a reason as anything else you've proposed. My answer covers an alternative to options your answer covers, nothing more. –  slm Apr 7 '13 at 17:35

I've seen this problem before. In my case it was due to a driver problem- the graphics card wasn't coming back online again after waking the PC from sleep.

  • Try upgrading your graphics card drivers and seeing if that fixes it. If you are determined to fix this- you'll have to find a driver (or a version of your existing driver) which handles power state change properly.

  • Failing that- try disabling sleep mode and just letting the screen power down after an hour or so.

I've seen far too many problems with S3 (sleep) and S5 (hibernate) to want to use them any more or to recommend them to others. I will happily use screen dimming/ screen power off, and hard drive spin down options- but I no longer let my systems go into different power states due to the risk of total session data loss due to problems going back to S0 (I.e. waking up again)

The other thing about keeping a system running in S0 (just with the screen off) is that it will be able to defrag the drive, index your files, and install updates during the idle time- so it will do something constructive while you are away. If you are going to be away for a long time and this won't be connected to AC, then shutting it down is your best bet anyway as far as battery life and reliability is concerned.

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If it was a driver problem, why all of a sudden would it start not working? Also are you saying that you don't use the S3 or S5 states at all on your laptop? Are you suggesting that he just not use the S3 state then as a potential solution? (This isn't meant to sound snarky I'm just clarifying.) –  slm Apr 7 '13 at 17:42
A specific case: I had two Dell Latitude E6510 machines with this problem, with Nvidia NV3100 graphics. They had a fresh install of Windows 7. After waking from sleep the screen remained black. The drivers on the Dell site were older than the installed driver (which may have been supplied by the Windows install from Microsoft - I did not do the install). I updated the video driver with the latest driver from nvidia.com, and the problem went away. –  Dan Halbert Sep 14 at 11:21

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