Is it possible to test laptop screen inverters with a regular multimeter? I was asking myself exactly the same question many times before until I found this article published by Morris Rosenthal. Apparently, you can test inverters with a multimeter but you have to have the right one, with frequency rated at least 50KHz.

my $20 meter failed to register anything! So I borrowed a better meter from my neighbor, a Fluke 110 true RMS meter. The Fluke specs show it’s rated to 50KHz, which turned out to be critical in the inverter test application.

I’m not sure how accurate this test is, so I will probably find a Fluke multimeter and try it myself. If this test works 100%, it will be very helpful to me.

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Your IBM ThinkPad laptop screen (or any other laptop) went blank? Check out this article.

I could get the screen to come back on momentarily by toggling Fn-F7 a few times, but after about 10 seconds it went blank again. After rebooting, same thing — 10 seconds and blank.
Upon closer inspection, I noticed that I could actually see the windows very, very dimly on the screen. However, it was so faint I couldn’t see a cursor or read any text but the screen was definitely trying to project the image. So I hooked up an external monitor and the image displayed just fine.

The author of the above mentioned article article tried replacing the screen inverter board first but it didn’t help. After that he replaced the LCD screen and this resolved the problem.
From myself I would like to add a few more tips for troubleshooing and resolving laptop backlight problems.
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I have a Toshiba A105-s2716 satellite. At first the screen would start flashing. The screen went black and sometimes gray horizontal lines would appear. It would then turn black and go back to normal. After a week now, the screen will stay black after ten minutes of using my laptop. It works fine with a external monitor, many people tell me that its a hardware issue. My warranty expired so I’m trying to figure out the problem before I have it fixed. I need to fixed my laptop ASAP because i need for college.

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I have an HP Omnibook 6100 notebook, it was given to my niece as a gift. The original owner was a medical tech so she erased everything of the hard drive I do not know if she used format or just erase, anyway now the notebook acts like it is booting but the monitor is blank I tried the recovery disks no help. I made a support disk no help. I am almost sure that the video driver is gone but I can’t find a way to reinstall it. I went to the HP site and they have their advice no help. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I did try an external monitor – no help.

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I have a Dell Inspiron 1200 which suffered a black screen problem about 1-2 seconds after start up. I could just about make out the images on the screen by using a strong light source and tried all sorts to remedy it. After carrying out a system restore and turning the laptop on and off lots of times it came back on ok. Next day same problem – again remedied the same way, that was yesterday – I haven’t switched it off since and am using it now with no problems. I suspect this intermittent problem may be due to a faulty inverter. Any thoughts please?

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Every now and then my computer will just freeze and the display goes to a whitish blue screen. The picture just fades away into the new whitish blue screen. Then I have problems loading windows after a restart. It will ask me to start normally, or last known good configuration that worked. Every now and then I can get it to work but most of the times it just does the white screen freeze. Has anyone ever encountered something like this? or know something I should do?
It’s a Compaq Presario v2000 laptop.

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I have an IBM T30 that has a video problem: vertical lines appear and no video…but works perfect on external monitor.. Changed cable and ensured proper seating of the connectors. Vertical lines different thickness with new cable but still the same problem.
Could it be a dead LCD display?
I hope it’s not the mother board!!

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