Apple laptop turns on, but the screen stays black

Every time I boot this laptop up, I can hear everything running fine—the hard drive is spinning, the fan is whirring, all that—but the screen stays pitch black. No BIOS, no logo, nothing. It’s running Windows 7. I saw some tip on YouTube about pulling the battery and holding down the power button to drain the static, but that did absolutely nothing. I even tried swapping out the RAM sticks, still dead. The thing was just in the shop two days ago to get a cracked screen fixed, and it was working perfectly until today. I even tried plugging it into an external monitor, but still nothing. Someone please help me out here.🤷 🙂

Looks like the ribbon cable finally kicked the bucket... it's the one connecting both sides of the laptop together...
maybe the screen itself just gave up the ghost too, honestly, stuff like this happens all the time 😢
just take it down to the repair shop so the techs can take a look at it, thank god they're doing free diagnostics today

If you tried switching your display to an external monitor using those keyboard shortcuts, only to find the second screen stayed completely black, then your graphics card probably just bit the dust.

Joshua Garcia3 said:If you plugged in an external monitor and kept hitting those keyboard shortcuts to switch the display, but the screen stayed pitch black the whole time? Yeah, that’s usually a sign your graphics card just kicked the bucket.

I wouldn't jump to that conclusion just yet, though... I dealt with this exact same headache on my old PC just a few days ago, and turns out it wasn't even the GPU—it ended up being a dead motherboard.

What does it actually mean when someone says the motherboard is dead? Well, since the GPU is soldered directly onto the board, if the graphics chip itself dies, you’re basically looking at a dead motherboard anyway. I guess you could try getting the specific chip replaced, but most repair shops won't give you any kind of warranty on that sort of thing.