Laptop display woes.

Well for starters, I have 2 similar laptops, except one has 1 gig of ram, and the other has 2 gigs. I decided that the 1 gig was a little underpowered, so i took one of the 1gb modules for the 2 gig and put it in the place of a 512 module (2 laptops, gig and a half each.) The 1 gig laptop fired up just fine, but the screen on the two gig wouldn't come on. I reseated the ram, put the original ram back in, reseated the video card, but the screen won't display anything. I hear the "chimes" so I know windows boots properly. The screen lights up, but is black. The lapto is an Acer Aspire 7520-5823 Help!

 

all 4 ram modules work fine

 

Have you tried restoring both systems to how they were?
It sounds like the inverter has got fried though. If you look very closely at the screen when it is booting can you see anything? ie the normal Windows boot up screen?

 

Can you boot it to safe mode with the new RAM installed?

Laptops allocate an amount of the system RAM to handle graphics. If you increase the RAM substantially, as you have, then the allocation map no longer matched reality and the laptop gets confused. Booting in safe mode and reinstalling the video drivers forces a reallocation of memory, and fixes the problem.

The fact that you can hear the Windows boot sounds has me a bit worried that might not be the problem though.

 

I suspect the video card, as I can't see an external display either.

 

update: I got an external display working. The built in lcd is still black. It turns grey during boot up, but then turns black.

 

Sounds like the inverter, as I said previously.

 

How much do those cost?

 

Well today I finally sat down and fixed the problem. I got a new inverter for it off of ebay, however i now suspect that the old one was perfectly fine- as the screen "glowed" black/gray (meaning the backlight still worked) I completely dissasembled the screen, and plugged back in the internal (data) connecter that had come loose.