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How To Fix Your ThinkPad Display

If your ThinkPad display appears to be blank try the following steps.

1. First up, check that the system is powered on and also that it's not in suspend mode. To do this, press and hold the Fn key for 10 seconds.

2. Switch between the laptop's LCD screen and an external display by pressing the Fn and F7 keys simultaneously.
Note: There are generally three display modes to toggle through (LCD, CRT and both) but some Thinkpad models only support two display modes (LCD or CRT only).

3. Disconnect any externally connected displays.

4. Power your system down (remove the system if it's attached to a docking station or port replicator).

5. Check that the display is working when you start the machine (for ThinkPad A, G, R, T, X, and Z series systems).
When you power up the machine you should see the "Press F1 for BIOS Setup Utility", "To interrupt normal startup, press the blue Access IBM button", or "To interrupt normal startup, press the blue ThinkVantage button" message in the bottom left corner of the screen.

If you don't then there may be a problem with the LCD display itself, you can troubleshoot the problem further on our screen repair page.

Fault Finding Poor ThinkPad Display Quality

1. Ensure the display is clean (for info on cleaning your screen, click here ).

2. Check that your ThinkPad has the latest bios installed, you can check this in the bios set up utility. The bios downloads are available on the IBM support site.

3. Ensure that the latest video drivers are installed and are working correctly, you can check this on the support site here.

4. In the ThinkPad Configuration Utility turn off screen expansion. Some ThinkPads will allow the video to expand to fill the display and this can distort the text.

5. Verify your display settings are correct for resolution of the screen area and colour depth. Using a resolution that's smaller than the actual screen size and cause a black border to appear around the edges of the display.
  • To check these in Windows XP and 2000, click Start, Settings, Control Panel and then Display or Appearance and Themes and then Display.
  • In the Settings tab increase the screen resolution until the display fills the screen, click Apply to test each resolution setting.
  • Click the Advanced button to check the monitor, refresh rate (frequency) and hardware acceleration settings.
The typical settings for a ThinkPad display are;
  • 1024x768 screen resolution
  • refresh rate 60Hz
  • hardware acceleration set to Full
6. Verify the brightness setting, if it's set too low the display can appear dim. To check, press and hold the Fn key and press the Home key to turn up the brightness setting.

7. If your ThinkPad display has pixels that are missing, on all the time, or discolored then this is a common occurence with TFT LCD displays. However if the number of malfunctioning pixels exceeds a certain number then the display can be considered faulty. The actual number of pixels varies so search the Troubleshooting section of the Lenovo support site.



Click here to leave the ThinkPad display help page and go back to Pt.1 of our Lenovo ThinkPad diagnostic guides


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