Blank Screen

A blank screen usually indicates some kind of hardware defect.  This might be a bad connection to the screen, or the computer could be broken outright.

• Try looking very carefully at the screen under good light. It’s possible that it’s only the backlight that is dead, which can make the screen seem blank.  This would be a relatively cheap fix.
• If the screen is definitely blank, but you can hear the fans running, plug your computer into an external monitor. Almost all laptops have a VGA (blue) or DVI (white) port for connecting to another display such as an HDTV.

Otherwise, the manufacturer should be contacted for repairs. The UConn Co-op operates their own hardware repair service, and are a licensed repair site for Dell, Apple, Sony, Toshiba, IBM, and Lenovo notebooks. They recognize most warranties, but otherwise charge a labor cost of $60/hr (as of December 2008).