Dell Laptop Screen Dimming

An employee here has a Dell Latitude, Model No. PP01X. It's about a year old.

It has a beautiful 15" screen. A noticeble reddish tinge showed up a few months ago. No big problems, just a reddish tinge in displayed white areas of the screen.

This morning, the screen went dim. Really, really dim -- like, stick your nose up against the screen and you can just barely see the mouse pointer, dim.

However, it doesn't go dim for a minute or two on reboot. If you reboot, it comes back up, bright as anything. About the time you hit CTRL-ALT-DEL to login, it goes dim.

I hooked a CRT up to the docking station, and that displays just fine, which tells me that the video card is all right. It's dim whether it's docked or not, plugged in or on batteries.

I'm leaning against it being a hardware issue because on reboot, the screen comes up bright. The display hardware doesn't know if the machine is rebooting or not, so it should be dim all the time if that was the problem.

A search of Dell's Knowledge Base came up empty. Any debugging tips here?

Deane

 

Most likely it is a LCD problem. If it is under warnetty call dell.

 

I thought about that, but then why would it start out normal on reboot, then suddenly get dim? If it was a hardware problem, wouldn't it be dim all through POST and Windows startup?

Deane

 

It probably is a hardware problem and the display gets a good reset signal on a reboot. Try staying in the setup screen and booting in safe mode and see if the screen still dims. Also try pulling the battery and see if the screen stays bright running on AC only.