[RESPONDED] Display goes black after light impact

Framework Laptop 13 Linux
1

This is the second time this has happened to me. And thats since receiving my laptop in April this year.

So, on a train, I am working on my laptop. Yall know how a train is. It’s a bit shaky from side to side but not too much so to make a water bottle fall over. I say this to get it across that it was a very very light impact.

Naturally, you can guess what happens next. Yeah, my laptop hits the solid armrest to the side. No biggie. But suddenly, my screen went black! Surprisingly, the keyboard backlight and power button light didn’t go dark.

I’ve search and I’m pretty sure it’s not the magnetic lid switch. Because:

  1. the armrest is made out of aluminium which is not magnetic
  2. it hit to the right side of the laptop and AFAIK the lid switch is on the left besides the caps lock key
  3. if it would have been the case, then the keyboard and power button shouldn’t have stayed lit and instead shut down the computer

I could still, although blindly, interact with the operating system. I actually did Super+Enter to open a terminal. And then ran poweroff and it actually turned off the keyboard backlight and power button light.

This exact thing happened to me a month ago and in an extremely similar scenario. That time it luckily enough turned out to have fixed itself the day after that. But now twice?

2

I guess i should try reseating the display cable but i don’t have the screwdriver with me on my trip to Berlin so not rn.

3

Might also be a good idea to reseat RAM, and check for clues on next restart by getting previous journal log.

journalctl -b -1

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Update:

I did reseat the display cable and both RAM modules but still same issue.

I did realise something tho: about 10% of the time, the display isn’t actually completely black. It shows me a very very faint GRUB boot menu with the NixOS logo up at top. It’s very hard to see and its like the brightness is set at a hundredth of 1%. I don’t actually know if I can see systemd boot info too. It was so dark that maybe the only reason for i could see the GRUB menu is because GRUB doesn’t have a fully black background.

Do I just have to get a new display at this point or what. Any ideas?

5

I had a similar issue. It was the display cable, though I think it was the display end, not the end that goes into the main board. Hopefully I’m remembering correctly. Good luck

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OH YEAH THATS IT!!! yes that was indeed halfway unplugged! youre the best!!! :slight_smile: thaank youu!

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Just an addition, since I had reseated that cable I haven’t had any issues with its stability since. Hopefully your outcome is similar. Glad you’ve got it solved now.

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