I've got a friend's laptop that I guess needs either a new backlight or inverter. When it boots up, the BIOS flash screen looks fine, it's bright and the tint looks good. Same goes for the first few seconds of the Windows boot animation. Then at the same exact point in the boot process the backlight turns off, right when the login screen pops up.

So is it a bad backlight, inverter, or something else? Weird driver issue maybe?

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Posted by ILikeLSUToo

Central, LA

Member since Jan 2008

18018 posts

Posted on 6/8/15 at 2:22 pm to Korkstand

Does it behave the same if you boot into safe mode? Doesn't seem like it's a hardware issue to me.

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Posted by Korkstand

Member since Nov 2003

28708 posts

Posted on 6/8/15 at 2:59 pm to ILikeLSUToo

I'm a dummy. It works fine in safe mode, so I uninstalled the video driver and rebooted. It worked fine on a normal boot without the driver, so I let it reinstall the driver, reboot and... the damned backlight goes out again at the same point. Windows says the driver is up to date, so I guess I'll download and install one manually...

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Posted by Korkstand

Member since Nov 2003

28708 posts

Posted on 6/8/15 at 3:44 pm to Korkstand

I installed an updated video driver, same problem. So I checked the monitor driver, and turns out the vendor was TeamViewer. A quick search revealed similar issues, so I uninstalled TeamViewer, but the driver persisted after a reboot. So I had to remove the monitor (and check the box to remove the driver as well) in normal mode (because monitors don't appear in the device manager in safe mode), reboot and the issue is gone.

Don't know why I didn't try safe mode after I suspected it might be a driver issue, so I'm glad I posted here before I started ordering parts.