Ooookay. My brother–the geek/nerd/tech–and I went through a series of “tests”. I called him when I discovered a bizarre twist to the plot.
When the monitor turned off, I closed the lid. The Power Savings Setup is configured to then “hibernate” the laptop. When that was done, I re-opened the lid and hit the power button, which then turned the laptop back on and there would be the screen again.
Since I was having to do this from once an hour to every four minutes, I quickly learned to cheat. I closed the lid but opened it right back up again. The monitor would be on, I’d watch it hibernate, then I’d turn it back on.
Then I started noticing that the monitor was on just as soon as I lifted the lid and I’d see the screen as it was prior to it going off. So today, I did yet another set of experiments:
- I held the latch open, shut the lid, and lifted it back up again. The monitor was on.
- I opened the power settings and told it to not do anything when the lid closed. I closed the lid and opened it. The monitor was on.
That’s when I called Kev. He was as confused as I was. He decided to run me through all the previous tests again, just to make sure I did it “right” and that he understood what I was saying.
- did a hard reboot, restarted, waited, monitor went off
- did a boot up in safe mode, waited, monitor went off.
- did a boot in safe mood with command prompt, waited, monitor went off.
- hooked up an external monitor, waited, laptop monitor went off but external monitor stayed on.
We’d just proven it wasn’t a software issue. Had it been a software thing, the external monitor would have gone off too.
Then we tried lowering the monitor a few degrees, raising it back up, then going lower each time to see where the monitor would turn back on. It won’t until it is all the way down but the latch is not in the holes.
Hardware problem. There are two possible things. There’s a switch somewhere that tells the computer that the laptop is closed. That switch could be bad. There could be a bad wire somewhere between the card and the monitor. A bad monitor is not exactly the problem since it has no other problems.
Now that I know a little more about it, I will be able to know if the laptop fix-it folk know what they are doing.