New to Board, New to A31p's No Screen, just black- PLS Help

[garyjac]

I bought 5 A31p's to ship to my wifes family in Columbia.
4 out of 5 just needed new key code for XP, but the last one has a black screen. When I hooked it to a spare monitor I had 2 black screens. I tried to boot with F1, I tried FN-F7, and everthing else I could think of. I'm out of ideas. Anyone else care to take a stab at it? Thanks Gary

[rkawakami]

Welcome to thinpads.com!

While I'm not the A31p expert, (ask ajkula66 for those questions), I can give you some general information and ask a couple of follow-up questions:

- LCD not lighting up can be due to a failure in the backlight (CCFL) inside the LCD panel or the inverter (a DC-to-AC voltage converter which powers the CCFL)
- not getting video out the VGA port when cycling through Fn+F7 generally means a motherboard problem

Qs:

- when powering up, does the system otherwise act normally? By that I mean the CPU fan spins, the LED lights come on (power and hard disk activity, etc.)
- have you tried removing ALL extra hardware from the system? An X22 that was running fine up until yesteday, did not turn on. I removed the (failed) hard drive and everything was okay. Remove everything that plugs into anything else; memory, hard drive, MiniPCI card, ethernet, bluetooth, Ultrabay, etc. With just a shell, you should get a beep code that indicates a problem with memory (1-3-3-1). Replace the memory and power up again. Continue to replace parts until you find it doesn't turn on.