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I have an old Lenovo linux laptop with the following.. let's say symptoms:

  • On startup almost all the screen turns bright and then pure white, leaving only a little window of visible screen on the top. The shape of the white portion of the screen sometimes seems to change. This fact renders the laptop completely unusable.
  • This problem is also present in the bios (uefi), but only in certain sections of it, not in general; this makes the bios usable (this is the unusual part).
  • Changing settings in the bios randomly sometimes appears to make the situation better, but only momentarily (this is the strange part).
  • Installing a new linux OS from scratch, formatting everything, solves the problem but only for a short while, a couple of days, and then we are back to the white screen (this is the really strange part).
  • Connecting the laptop to an external monitor seems to solve the problem, in the sense that the laptop outputs the image to the external monitor without any white band.

My question is: What is going on? What could possibly motivate this behaviour, and how could I fix it?

Noumeno
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2 Answers2

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I have seen this a few times. There are 3 possibilities:

  • Problem with cable
  • Problem with screen
  • Problem with video card

It's almost certain that the cable needs to be reinserted. Often, I just take apart the laptop, and reinsert the cable and it's good as new. Less common is the screen. And the video card is almost never the problem.
When you take apart the laptop, be careful not to handle the LCD screen too tightly, the edge where the internal connections (matrix) are made are rather sensitive and poorly protected (IMO). You just need to be easy with it.

rfportilla
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Since you've already tried formatting we can discard the possibility of malware causing this.

The fact that connecting the laptop to an external monitor works properly may serve as confirmation that the problem is isolated to your laptop's screen and that it is not a problem with the other components of your laptop eg. graphics card/motherboard/ram...

Now, what's going on? To put it simply you may have a physically faulty screen. Normally to fix this you'd have to look for an actual expert on this matter or you can try to replace the screen yourself (you can google a bit on how to DIY this).

EstoesMoises
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