XPS M1530 Display Issues. Need some suggestions.

I am so frustrated with this laptop .

The display started going out about a month ago on my wife's M1530. It would sometimes boot up and work perfectly. Other times it would boot up, and the display would stay black. Finally the display just stopped working completely. However, the computer still worked fine through HDMI.

I figured no problem, it is probably the LCD inverter or a back light issue, or even possibly the LCD ribbon cable (it was kind of in rough shape). I started with the cheapest part first and ordered a new LCD inverter. Replaced it, and nothing. Still not working correctly. So I ordered the ribbon cable, and still not working correctly. I decided to just scrap the idea of fixing the LCD and ordered a brand new one off of ebay.

Still can't get this display to work even with the brand new one installed. So I deduce that it is not an LCD issue .

What else could it be? I'm guessing something happened, probably heat related, to the GPU connector that is on the motherboard itself. Any other suggestions to try?

 

Yea if you are sure it's not LCD, then it's gotta be GPU related. Only way to fix that is to replace the whole motherboard.

 

If it's an M1530, it's almost certainly a GPU issue. Test it with an external monitor. If you don't get an output or get a garbled output, then your GPU is hosed.

 

That's the wierd part; it works fine through the hdmi port when i plug it into an external monitor. I just can't get the internal lcd working.

 

If it works with the HDMI port it must be the LCD. However, the GPU issue is quite common on these M1530s. Many of my friend's M1530s have failed due to the GPU going out. There is an error code that it will give with the leds next to the power button flashing on boot up. But if your getting it to work just fine with external display then clearly there has to be something wrong with the internal display.

 

I am facing somewhat similar issue with my XPSM1530
Couple of weeks back display went black and didn't come up. When i connect external monitor through VGA cable and/or HDMI cable, it comes perfectly fine, but nothing on notebook display. So i concluded that its an LCD issue and ordered LCD with Backlight inverter. But after installing brand new LCD with Backlight driver also, no change in the behavior. Notebook display still doesn't show anything where as external monitors show the display. Can anybody help.
I dont suspect GPU since display is coming on external sources, so culprits might be either internal display cable or connector ?

 

Try running the Dell Diagnostics by holding down the Fn key while turning on the computer. Hook up your monitor so you can see the results of these tests (hopefully, if it will show on external monitors at this point in the boot process)

 

Today i downgraded BIOS from A12 to A09 (to get my battery charging which was at 3% and not charging) and magically my new display came up. Hopefully it stays on.
By the way, there is a known issue with A12 BIOS Rev that battery doesn't get charged even if is ok. So in some blogs i saw that by downgrading it to A09, battery charging will start. The pain i went was in getting BIOS flashed when my battery is 3% (below 10% it wont allow). I had to make a bootable USB and copy A09 image in the root directory. And then after booting to USB drive, typed in the command with "/forceit". While rebooting i removed my USB drive to boot it from HDD.