About Vostro 1500's backlight.

The black light for my Vostro 1500 does not turn off when my screen is closed. Is this normal or is there a fix I need to apply to my laptop. I have never experienced a laptop that does this before and I did try to search the forums. Thanks.

 

no its not, likely you will need a lcd replacement as the sensor is not working.

 

What option have you set when the lid is closed? Check here first, reset it to defaults, reboot and check again. If it is a software issue, it should be solved otherwise you need to contact Dell.

 

It should be fine. I'm assuming that you've got it set (power options) so that it doesn't do anything when you close the lid? Yeah, my 1520 does this too, and it's annoying.

To clarify, when I set it to go into standby when I close the lid, that works, however, when it's set to do nothing, the screen doesn't turn off like in most notebooks. BTW, I'm running XP, so this may or may not have worked in Vista, but I don't remember because I installed XP pretty quick.

Anyone got a fix? Does this work properly in Vista?

 

Well the two options I have are Do Nothing and Standby. I have not tried to see if closing the lid will force the system to go into standby, but I will do it soon. By the way there are three items called "Base System Device" in device manager that are driverless, could those be the problem? I tried to install all the drivers off Dell's website minus the software ones. My BIOS version is A00 if that matters.

Edit: Just tried it and stand by works fine. I think my problem is the same as Wellsley's. I am also running XP and I have a 8600gt with nvidia control panel enabled.

 

I just realized my screen doesn't turn off when I close the laptop. Since I just reinstalled XP, I thought it was because I didn't have quickset installed. So I installed it, but the only two options are "do nothing" or "standby". That is stupid! My Toshiba allowed me to choose to just turn off the screen. And it had a simple utility for managing the battery. This quickset is full of useless things and lacks the important ones.

Is there any other utility we can use?

 

I am guessing this might be a problem with XP then... All three of us having this problem are using Windows XP.

 

Yes, that might be the case. But the problem is, doesn't Dell have a basic utility for managing the battery, and therefore creating profiles which allow us to decide what to do with the screen when laptop is closed?

I mean, is really Quickset the only thing we have?

 

I had the issue with XP.. I installed XP as an experiment twice. The first time I didn't have the issue, the 2nd time, the lcd would not power off when closed.

I did quite a bit of searching and it has to do with the XP installation itself, the only remedy is to reinstall and the first thing you should do is test to see if the lcd powers off when the lid is closed. If not, you need to reinstall again.

I resorted to creating a shortcut on the desktop that powers off the lcd, you can search around for these. It became a pain in the butt after a while.

 

Check power options and hibernation. Something isn't configured correctly

 

Hibernation is disabled for me since I don't plan on using it. This is already the second time I have installed XP SP2 so I don't think more trials and errors would do me any good. Thanks everyone for your help, I guess I'll just have to live with it and hope the warranty covers it if the LCD lamp decides to burn out.

 

But can I ask you by which application are you trying to make this work? Dell Quickset? What else? How do you manage standby, ibernation and these kind of things?