I have had a Dell Latitude E6500 laptop for about a year now and my display now goes blank after no longer than a couple of minutes. Sometimes it will even be during the bios post, the screen is still blank. It's worth noting I spilled Coke on it last year, but cleaned it out the best I can and haven't had any problems since then. It is a refurbished laptop as well (I'm dealing with a bunch of arguments with Dell at the moment about warranty). A normal start up sequence goes like so:
- I will power up the PC
- Laptop posts to bios and Windows/Ubuntu loads
- Windows/Linux starts up
- I log in
- As soon as I get a chance to open up Chrome or anything else the laptop goes black
- If its still logging in at the time the screen goes out, I can still hear sounds so I know everything else is working (main reason I think it's not the gfx card)
- I will reboot the laptop, sometimes it will be black at post, sometimes I will go through the same sequence (sometimes trying the other OS)
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Also worth noting I tried to re-fasten the display ribbon to the motherboard in case it was loose.