black screen on laptop

gotta question, any advice would be helpful.  my laptop screen goes, and stays black when I start it up.  even when i restart, it still goes black.  what can i do to fix this?  the laptop is about 4 years old, so i dont know if its something I can fix, or if its just old and done.  any advice would be helpful.

i read somewhere online that if you pull your battery, and then hold down the power button for 30 seconds to a minute, it should resolve the issue.  i have not tried to do this yet, as i would like some other opinions first.  anyone with knowledge about this?

You could try to hook the laptop up to an extern monitor. That way you can make sure if it is a monitor issue or something else hardware related.

thanks mikael99, i will give that a try

So what are your findings?

I believe it has a virus or needs a battery replacement.

If its a Dell it may have the battery drainage issue

do you  get sound? hook up to external monitor...report findings..might be shot capacitors..

I have sort of the same problem with one of my laptops....I ran a diagnostics on it and it came back with an error code reading...

1000-1042....probably a hard - drive issue..



Press F12 and run a diagnostics check...it may give you a clue as to what is wrong.

You have one of 3 problems:

1) the florescent bulb that lights up your monitor is no good.
2) the circuit board that provides the power to the florescent light is bad
or
3) the little switch that gets activated when you close your laptop is bad or broken. If you flick it up and down does the light come back on? If so you need a new one.

If you get a good flashlight, mag-light, and shine it at your screen while its dark in the room you should be able to see your desktop.

If you have a desktop switch the monitor over to your laptop. Once connected you need to hold down these combination of keys at the same time for a second and then release:
fn +F2
or
fn +F3
or fn +F4
and so on until F8.

thanks guys.  i had to take the laptop to get fixed.  ended up selling it for $10 and bought a refurbished one off the repair guy.  the guy ended up installing a new hard drive and a whole bunch of other shit.  he now uses it himself.  fine by me.  i now have a laptop that works.  thanks again for the help guys.

RichardA:  the issue was with my hard drive.  thanks for your help

chilitokid: