X40 Win7 screen goes dark, comes back after hibernate/wake

[bdwelle]

I have an X40 (2371-8LU) with a drop-in 32Gb SSD and Windows 7 (Home). Everything has been working great but in the last couple of weeks a bad symptom has cropped up. When I'm working on the machine for some time (anywhere from 10 minutes to more than an hour), the screen goes dark. It doesn't lose signal to the screen entirely because I can still see the image by tilting the screen from side to side, and if I change windows with Alt-Tab, for example, the screen still responds. It's just that the screen has lost ALL brightness and is impossible to use in that state. The machine has NOT crashed. I can restore the screen by doing hibernate/wake, and it comes back perfectly, but then will go out again after some random period of time.

I suspect some sort of Windows 7 power management issue to do with missing drivers for the X40, but I've looked around and found nothing down that road. The problem seems to be happening more and more often in recent days, and so now I'm starting to think it might be hardware, somehow - the backlight?

Ideas?

[Vempele]

Inverter and/or LCD cable, or so I was told when I called about the exact same symptoms in my T60.

"Trouble Notes: replaced lcd panel, test ok."

[sjthinkpader]

Could be the CCF backlight going out too.

[bemymonkey]

Inverter or CCFL are more likely to be the problem, since the LCD still seems to be getting a signal.