Laptop screen goes black when connected to external monitor, but nothing shows up on the monitor eit

How am I supposed to get this thing up and running? Apparently, when my buddy took his setup to a repair shop, everything worked perfectly fine on his TV, yet here I am dealing with nothing but dead air.

What kind of laptop are we talking about—what's the model and the OS? And for the display, are you hooking up to a monitor or a TV? Also, what cable are you using—VGA, HDMI, LAN... or just relying on Wi-Fi? Most importantly, what exactly is cutting out?

...that's probably why nobody's chiming in on this thread yet.

I’m working with a Dell Inspiron running Windows 7 Ultimate. My setup involves a Samsung LED TV—specifically the 32550DW model—connected via an HDMI cable. Everything was functioning perfectly until it just decided to quit on me out of nowhere. Now, when I hook the laptop up to the TV via HDMI, the laptop loses both video and audio entirely, while the television simply displays a "No Signal" message. I've already tested this across HDMI ports 1, 2, and 3 without any luck.

Since everything works flawlessly when I test it on my buddy's setup, it feels like the issue is localized to my TV.

Sam Wright21 said:My bad, the laptop is a Dell Inspiron. Running Windows 7 Ultimate. The TV is a Samsung LED model, and I'm using an HDMI cable. Everything was working perfectly fine until it just decided to quit on me out of nowhere—now, whenever I hook the laptop up via HDMI, the laptop loses all video and audio, and the TV just sits there staring at me with a "No Signal" message on HDMI ports 1, 2, and 3.

Since it works fine over at my buddy's place, I'm leaning towards the TV being the culprit here.

Have you tried swapping out the cable for a different one yet?

just try dropping the resolution on your laptop before you plug it in

Actually, I ran this exact same cable at a buddy's place and everything worked perfectly fine. Thanks for the tip; I'll try dropping the resolution and see if that stabilizes things. I'll let you know how it goes.