Latitude D600 LCD Display Problem

I recently encountered a problem with my Dell Latitude D600's LCD display. For whatever reason the LCD display would not display anything; only the external monitor display was working correctly.

In other words, when I booted up, nothing showed up on the laptop's LCD display - all video output was directed to my external monitor.

I looked on several forums and was not able to find a solution to this problem. I was certain the display still worked correctly and was not broken.

Here's what I did to resolve this issue; hope it works for others out there:

1. Shut down laptop
2. Unplug the laptop
3. Take out the battery
4. Let the laptop sit without any power source for at least 1 hour
5. Reinsert battery
6. DO NOT attach the laptop to an external monitor or any other auxiliary device
7. Power back on


After doing this my laptop again correctly displayed data to the LCD screen. I'm not positive why this happens, but here's a guess. When my laptop entered standby mode I disconnected it from the external monitor (I use the laptop's LCD screen and an external monitor in dual screen mode). After re-awakening from standby; or, after shutting down in standby and then re-booting, it seems like the laptop gets confused about what it's primary display device is. Going into BIOS during this confused state I noticed that the Panel Type was "Unknown Panel".

Discharging the laptop - wiping any temporary memory I guess - seemed to fix the problem.


If you'd like to disable standby-mode you can do the following:

1. Go to Control Panel
2. Double click Power Options
3. On the various tabs, disable all timed and automatic standby modes
4. Click OK.



Hope this is helpful and alleviates some frustration for someone.

- Rho