Hi, when I startup my acer laptop, the screen stays black but the backlight is working just fine. The laptop is booting as normal. When i connect to a vga monitor I see everything boots just fine, UNTIL the xp boot screen, then the vga monitor goes to standby and the laptop sreen turns on. But only the black screen. In safe mode I can use the vga monitor the whole way. This happends not all the time! Sometimes it boots WITH the laptop monitor working just fine. I cant figure out when it is working and when not, so I cant figure out whats wrong. Could it has something to do with the battery? (adapter connected all the time) Please help! To help or to be helped, what's the question?

Your laptop display - it's common to have problems with the voltage inverter for the backlight, and/or the backlight, especially if the laptop has been used a lot for a long time, or if the laptop has been dropped or subjected to a phyiscal jolt at any time. The problem is often intermittant at first - eventually the display will be black or very very dim all the time. For some info about replacing a voltage inverter or backlight, and what some typical symptoms are, see response 5 in this: http://www.computing.net/hardware/w... .... Your external monitor display. Some video chipset drivers will produce no display in normal mode, and sometimes also no display in Safe mode, in Windows if they can't determine the monitor type properly. This usually happens with older monitors that can't broadcast their type via Plug and Play info. In that case, either... - load the manufacturer's specific drivers for the external monitor model, or less preferably, Plug and Play Monitor drivers, when the external monitor is connected, if you still have a display on the laptop display - then after that they should be loaded automatically whenever the extermal monitor is connected. See the latter part of the next part for more info about how to do that. or - Press F8 repeatedly while booting just like you do to go into Safe mode, but choose Enable VGA mode from the menu instead of Safe mode (you may not get a display in Safe mode either with some monitors / some video chipset drivers). Windows then loads the same things it does in normal mode, unlike Safe mode which does not, except the video is forced into a basic VGA mode all monitors and video chipsets support. RIGHT click on a blank area of the desktop, choose Properties (goes to Display Properties) - choose the Settings tab. You will probably see there the external monitor type is not identified (if it were even merely Default Monitor you would have a display when you boot normally). There may or may not be two displays shown - if there are two, there may be two monitor listings in the following. Advanced button, Monitor tab (if there are two Monitors listed, pick the unidentified one), Properties, Driver, Update Driver, Install from a list; Don't Search, I will choose the driver; then do any of: - if Plug and Play Monitor is listed, select it - if Plug and Play Monitor is NOT listed, remove the checkmark from the box beside Show compatible hardware, and then select Plug and Play Monitor from the standard types then shown. OR - you could also do that and try scrolling through the list to see if XP has the drivers built in for the monitor make and model, but usually it doesn't unless the monitor is as old as XP is, and it will not if it is an LCD monitor, or you could choose generic drivers but you will probably have fewer resolutions to choose from. - if you have specific drivers avaialble for the monitor, click on Have Disk and Browse to where the drivers are - Windows is looking for *.inf files - you may need to extract them from a download you got, or run the download you got, to reveal them. If the monitor is an LCD monitor, it is recommended you do this, if specific drivers are available. Plug and Play Monitor drivers in XP were designed way back before XP first came out and have probably not changed at all since, and have settings you can choose that can DAMAGE an LCD monitor. - finish installing the drivers you chose, which will save the settings. Reboot normally - you should have a display on the external monitor in Windows.

Thnx for replying. I will look into it. Ive got the lcd monitor driver backed up.. Regards To help or to be helped, what's the question?