Solved! HDMI Cable suddenly causing a black screen on Lenovo laptop?

[mharte88]

Hi, for over three yrs I have plugged in my hdmi cable then my Samsung prompts for the format channel; yesterday I had taken out the hdmi cable (I leave it in all the time generally, but on a previous Lenovo, it eventually wore the Jack pin out). So, I was plugging in the cable as my tv was ready and mirroring the laptop for a film, when the laptop screen just went black.

I have read a couple of suggestions on Tom's Guide, but it concentrates on "never plugging the cable in when the laptop is on", like that is what is causing the problem. But I have never experienced that. My Lenovo is inclined to disable stuff all on its own ie: my cursor swopping it for a mouse being enabled, but other than that there are no other problems. I had a Lenovo Cream 110S before and love them, they are compact, light (bc they are basically plastic) and this one is just a year old. The previous one was 5 years old and it was cheaper to buy a refurb, than replace the battery and power on jack and hdmi cable jack which had worn out, or the pins had bent.
Please can someone help, do I need device manager prompt? I thought it was working alright as it was mirroring last night fine, then not fine?
Thank you guys, love the site.

Molly

 

[AlHuneke]

All the external ports on your laptop are connectors and these all have a finite life. For typical consumer equipment that is probably 1000+ cycles but there are no guarantees. Better not to plug multiple times a day as the connectors will wear out.

When you plug in HDMI, there is initial communication (handshake) that tells the host (laptop) the characteristics of what it is talking to. Having the LT screen black out sounds like the LT may think that is what you want to do. There is a function key (on my LT it is F4) that defines what happens. One option is to blank out the LT screen. See if you can change the settings.

HDMI is defined to work OK with plugging while the power is on. However, the controller can get confused sometime during the initial plugin data exchange. Maybe that's what the other articles were referring to. I have also read that poor quality cables don't have the proper design to "hot plug" (one pin has to be a little longer). I've never had an issue hot plugging but I always buy good cables (or I've just been lucky).

 

[mharte88]

All the external ports on your laptop are connectors and these all have a finite life. For typical consumer equipment that is probably 1000+ cycles but there are no guarantees. Better not to plug multiple times a day as the connectors will wear out.

When you plug in HDMI, there is initial communication (handshake) that tells the host (laptop) the characteristics of what it is talking to. Having the LT screen black out sounds like the LT may think that is what you want to do. There is a function key (on my LT it is F4) that defines what happens. One option is to blank out the LT screen. See if you can change the settings.

HDMI is defined to work OK with plugging while the power is on. However, the controller can get confused sometime during the initial plugin data exchange. Maybe that's what the other articles were referring to. I have also read that poor quality cables don't have the proper design to "hot plug" (one pin has to be a little longer). I've never had an issue hot plugging but I always buy good cables (or I've just been lucky).

I appreciate the information, and swift reply. I have my laptop just for watching tv "mirrored" movies while an old one for photos to post etc., bc they take up so much memory and I have yet to upgrade my Lenovo 110S to more memory/storage (it has 2GB).
Therefore the HDMI has been plugged in for over six months. The honest reason for unplugging is as my daughter recently bought a puppy, and I had to ensure when they visited, it was completely out of the way.
So really it has in that time been unplugged three times approximately. It is a sturdy cable not cheap not expensive, but knowing now, how you can damage the cable pins by keep plugging and unplugging them, when I got this laptop last July, I stopped doing it, same with the power up plug.
You say, "change the settings", that sounded helpful, could you explain please?
When I first set up the hdmi facility with the laptop it had to be done via a setting, but now with the new Samsung tv I got at Xmas, you simply bring up the channel screen and it goes to the HDMI2 screen when selected. So I have not been into any laptop settings since last July.
This is the first time since Xmas 2020 I have had any problem. Now even if I plug in HDMI cable before I switch the laptop on (the same as before as it was already plugged in), the laptop screen will not come on?
I appreciate your help, sometimes we only know about how to rectify a problem once we have experienced it!!
Stay safe

M. Harte

 

[AlHuneke]

All laptops I'm familiar with have a function key (my machine uses F4) that allows you to define what happens when you plug in an external monitor--duplicate the LT screen, run dual screens, turn off the ext screen or turn off the LT screen. You need to find this key. Suggest you press each function key in turn until you find it. You may need to press an shift (fn) key at the same time.