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My screen of my Lenovo Ideapad S400 recently stopped working.

It is less than a year old, and Lenovo/Medion state that it is not covered by warranty since it looks like having been damaged. Nothing the like has happened. I just sent it to sleep the previous day, then the next morning I 'awakened' it and got a mainly grey-blueish screen with some strange pattern in one corner and some stripes across it. There is no physical damage on the screen.

photo

My question is: What is the cause of this? How can this happen/be explained? Has anyone else experienced anything similar?

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  • Nevermind, I just saw the image :) That's definitely a broken screen. If your laptop had somehow become excessively hot during the night, it could cause the screen to possibly crack.
    – byachna
    Apr 10, 2014 at 19:39
  • This kind of failure is usually the liquid inside the screen leaking which often happens due to pressure or heavy impact. A screen must be really hot for it to burst, but even then it should not give you this kind of image.
    – LPChip
    Apr 10, 2014 at 20:08
  • You could claim that it's the Fibonacci spiral, and as such, it occurs naturally without user involvement.
    – Samir
    Apr 10, 2014 at 22:38
  • Seriously though, if what you say is true you could talk to the store manager or whoever is responsible for complaints and other such matters. You could take your case to the consumer adviser and the consumer complaints board (if these exist in your country).
    – Samir
    Apr 10, 2014 at 22:51
  • At least in Sweden we have these, and their job is to protect your rights as a consumer. Their service is free. They help a lot of people when they get stuck in disputes with big ugly companies. Unfortunately the board can only issue recommendations in each case, and companies don't have to follow these recommendations. They can't order them to do that. But companies usually follow these recommendations, in the fear of loosing their face/image/reputation. We have a very good legislation here that protects the consumer, and having this "consumer board" (loosely translated) only adds to that.
    – Samir
    Apr 10, 2014 at 22:56

2 Answers 2

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The cause of this is hard to determine without taking the laptop apart and examining the surface of the screen itself. From the looks of the picture, it looks like the screen has cracked. Sometimes, if you open a laptop by the corner of the lid instead of opening it directly from the center, it could actually cause enough pressure to cause a crack like this.

Another way this might have happened, is if the laptop was generating an excessive amount of heat with the lid closed. (Sometimes newer PC's startup during the night to install patches). Granted, this is probably much rarer of an occurrence.

I have had cracked laptop screens before, but its usually because when I wake up in the middle of the night, I end up tripping over it (If its on the ground) :).

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  • My guess would be that either something was on the keyboard and the lid was closed on it, or that there was pressure on the screen from behind while it was closed.
    – Michael Frank
    Apr 10, 2014 at 20:56
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As to why that happened, I would say it's probably because of overheating and bad quality components. As others have stated, modern laptops are able to wake up on their own to apply updates, or to run a pre-set automation process. Such as backing up your data. I know that Acronis True Image for example is able to wake up my computer even when asleep (I can set that up in settings) to back up my data. If you then have uTorrent installed and running for example, it can prevent your computer (this can be changed in settings) from going back to sleep.

So your laptop could potentially have been awake throughout the entire night. If the lid was closed, the screen should not have been on. If it was in fact on, then that's a fatal error. But if it was doing something very work intensive it could still have overheated and affected the screen, which was now closer to the main unit because the lid was closed. If overheating was the cause, then it might have just gotten away with it if the lid was left open to help it cool down. Ambient temperature and humidity should not be left out of the equation either.

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