Latitude E5540 - Nothing showing on internal display

Hi pcdd2015,

Thanks for posting.

This can be caused by a couple of things. 

The display function key may be turned off, you can try Fn + F8

If there's a backlight failure on the laptop, you may be able to shine a flashlight into the screen and if you look closely and see characters on the screen from the light, it may mean the backlight is broken. 

If the cable from the video card to the screen is damaged, broken, or unplugged this can cause the same symptoms.  You will have to open the case to check this blog for details.

Or, the LCD itself may be bad, see the above blog for details.  You can purchase LCDs from different places; Dell Spare Parts; parts-people.com; or Discount Electronics are good ones to try. 

Post back if you need additional assistance and the experts here will be happy to answer. Thanks.

Regards,
Robert

Thanks for the reply.

I had Win10 on the laptop. Unfortunately nothing seemed to work out. I have installed now Win 7, that is how the laptop came along. Installing Windows was fine, as soon as i installed the driver and restart the computer display stays dark. My first guess is that the video card is damaged but not sure what to think why neither does anything. There is a intel and a nvidia video card in the computer.

On the external display everything works perfectly fine.

If the card were damaged, the external display wouldn't work at all.  Be sure you've installed all Windows 7 drivers.  Go to the driver support page, enter your service tag and download and install the W7 drivers for all your applications.

Unfortunately that doesn't help either. Formatted the hard drive and installed freshly Win7 but still short before logging in to Windows the display goes black. Same with Win10.

Works perfectly fine on external display. BIOS update was no help, loading default settings neither.

So you are able to see something on the screen while it's posting, like in DOS mode?

Yes, everything works fine until i get to the windows log on. I can enter the BIOS and so on with no problem.

Be sure you have adjusted the settings so that the internal screen is selected.  You may have to do the adjustment from safe mode, if you're unable to get past the bios.

-Robert