Laptop doesn’t recognize his own monitor
Dell Precision 7550 with Windows 11.
Guys this is absolute cinema, it literally happened overnight without me doing anything. I turn on the laptop, the Dell logo shows up normally, but once boot is complete the screen goes black and stays black. If I connect it via HDMI to an external monitor everything works like nothing happened, but in Windows settings the only detected display is the external monitor. The laptop’s own screen is treated like it doesn’t even exist. Moreover if I open the BIOS during startup, it shows up perfectly fine on the “screen that according to Windows doesn’t exist” and I can navigate it without any issues.
One last detail: ever since this problem started, the keyboard backlight and all the function keys (F1 to F12) have completely stopped working too.
So yeah, if anyone has the slightest idea what the hell could be causing this, please speak up. I’m assuming it’s a Windows issue and not hardware since the screen clearly isn’t dead. And if that’s the case, I think it might finally be time to tell Microslop to fuck off and switch to Linux.
EDIT
I’ll summarize how the issue was resolved in case someone with the same problem comes across this post in the future.
The bug is fairly obscure, but it has also been reported by other people with the same laptop model on Reddit. The issue involves the integrated Intel graphics card and its drivers, apparently caused by some Windows update.
A guy claimed he fixed it by uninstalling the Intel graphics drivers and reinstalling an older version (downloadable from the Dell website). I’ll post the link to the other thread in the comments.
I tried that approach, but it didn’t work for me. In the end, since I had already wasted half a day on it, I decided to take the laptop to a professional, who fixed it quickly. He didn’t go into detail, but he said there was a corrupted/damaged file that the drivers depended on.
Cost: €30, which honestly seems more than fair.