R31 2656-L1U Video

[fuzzypup]

Two problems with an R31 2656-L1U which may or may not be related:

Operating system XP Home SP3

1. When booting from cold start the computer sometimes will display normally. Other times the screen will be dark with only faint display similar to a bad inverter or backlight situation. Pressing Fn-Home will cause the screen to display properly and operates fine. This dark display happens every time when rebooting from an operating condition. Screen is set to maximum brightness in the bios. Tried a known good replacement LCD with same result.

2. After reloading XP Home on newly formatted hard drive, I installed all the necessary drivers from the Lenovo web site to clear the device manager except the video driver will not install. Each time I run the video driver setup I get an error code of "Cannot generate proper PnP subkey" and installation stops. Many Googles have located others with a similar problem but no solution.

Any suggestions to clear these problems would be appreciated.

[SMA]

If you can get access to the CE Utility Diskette then you might be able to verify that your inverter has a valid LCD panel ID stored in the EEPROM on the inverter board.
The Hardware Maintenance Manual describes the procedure.

[fuzzypup]

Thanks for that. I will check out the HMM for the procedure.

I did manage to get the correct Intel chipset driver installed following some intructions from another topic on this site. That solved the graphics driver issue. Unffortunately it had no effect on the requirement to press Fn-Home to get screen to display.