Were you using Adalia Fundamentals? I've read on this forum that it had virus or something like that...

If you start another running joke about Adalia Fundamentals that escalates to the level of the "tinyE got banned" joke, I'm personally escorting you to the dungeon.

Does the laptop have a model number, manufacturer?

If there is a problem on motherboard, then the fans should spin, but the system would powerdown by itself without going into post. Unless you spilled something on the laptop, the local electronics guy should fix it by finding and resoldering a new capacitor and/or replace the fuse.

Check this:

In this post I explain how I test the inverter board in a laptop.

The inverter failure is very similar to the backlight lamp failure. In both cases the screen gets very dark and the image becomes very faint, barely visible under a bright light.

There is only one reliable way to test the inverter – replacing it with another one and see if the screen lights up after that.

Alternatively, you can connect a new backlight lamp and see if your presumably bad inverter lights it up.

In most cases I go with the second method – using my test backlight lamp. Why? Because the same backlight lamp will work with many different inverters as long as they have matching connectors.

Usually the inverter is mounted inside the display panel below the screen. In most cases you can access it after you remove the display bezel. The inverter has connectors on both ends. The left side connects to the LCD cable. The right side connects to the backlight lamp which is mounted inside the screen.

To make sure that inverter gets power from the motherboard (via the LCD cable), you can test it with a voltmeter. In my case I connected the “+” lead of the voltmeter to the pin 1 and the “-” lead to the ground trace around the screw hole. I got about 19.4V DC on that side of the board, so it’s getting power from the motherboard.

WARNING! If you accidentally short something on the inverter while testing, you can damage it. Proceed on your own risk! Not sure? Don’t do that!

So far we know the inverter is getting power from the motherboard, but the screen still has no light. Apparently, it’s either bad inverter or failed backlight lamp.

Now let’s test it with a known good backlight lamp.

1. Unplug the screen backlight cable from the right side of the inverter.
2. Connect a known good backlight lamp.

Turn on the laptop.
1. If the test backlight turns on, the lamp inside the screen is bad. In this case you’ll have to replace the screen. Also, you can replace the backligth lamp which is not easy and not recommended.
2. If the test backlight doesn’t turn on, most likely we have inverter failure. Replace it and test the laptop again.

There are two different types of backlight connector, you can see them on the picture below. The top one (big) is not as common as the bottom one (small). I mostly use lamps with a small connector.

IMPORTANT! When you buy a new lamp for test, make sure the connector fits your inverter.


http://www.laptoprepair101.com/how-test-lcd-screen-inverter-in-laptop/

http://www.laptoprepair101.com/notebook-display-diagram/

http://www.laptoprepair101.com/replace-laptop-backlight-ccfl-lamp/

https://media.giphy.com/media/xTiTnutUTT9U5tbj9K/giphy.gif

Throw holy water on it and tell the evil spirits to leave it in peace.

It's a Dell Inspiron, I can check the model number and stuff when I get to it later.

It doesn't shut itself down automatically, so I don't know if that's it (it does turn off with one press of the power button though, rather than having to hold it down), but I'm hoping it will be a simple fix like that anyway.
Thank you for the detailed post. I don't think it's (just) the screen as plugging a monitor in did nothing, and it's not making the right noises to suggest a normal start up. If the screen is at fault as well I'll let a professional sort it as I don't have the right tools...



If it may help diagnosis the issue I just remembered it did a weird thing a couple of days ago. When I booted up and logged in it treated me like a new user (the preparing desktop message came up after the welcome loading screen, then the profile was all set to default settings but with the correct icons on the desktop). I restarted and logged in again and it was fine, but I don't know what might cause that... hopefully not a hard drive fault though I would assume that to be the most likely culprit for that incident anyway..

Dead mofo!

...

I mean dead mobo.

Why do you say "hopefully not"? Since you have fresh backups, if the hard drive was the culprit, it is one of the components in a laptop which is the easiest (and possibly quite cheap) to replace.

Then again since you apparently can't even get to BIOS setup, I feel it is probably something else. If you could get to BIOS setup, you could tell it to boot from USB and try with e.g. a bootable Linux USB flash drive, or a DVD-R, whether your system starts up with that. As I said somewhere, I recently had the internal hard drive fried on my old Dell laptop, and now I am running that laptop booting from an external USB hard drive (running Linux Mint 17.3).

Mainly because I don't want to have lost the work I've done since the back up (it's not really all that much, just some accounts for work and some script stuff, but the first are somewhat difficult to replicate and the second annoying to have to rewrite)
Otherwise I would agree that the hard drive failing is probably on the better end of the possible outcomes spectrum..

Yeah I tried booting from a linux usb I had, but there was nothing showing on screen to even attempt it because no BIOS..

What if fault is in laptop's screen wiring?

Ko with external monitor and no bios.
Seems quite dead.

What do you mean you "need it"? That's not how one bakes a pizza!

On a more serious note, that sucks big time. Best case scenario would be a dead CMOS battery. Was it slower to boot lately?
Fingers crossed it's not a dead mobo (which unfortunately could explain the no bios and no beep codes), cause depending on how old your laptop is it may be quite hard, and pricey, to replace it.

Do you (or a friend) have another system to check if the HDD is still OK?

You've clearly never seen me make pizza ;)

Yes it does... I'm hoping so too, I haven't noticed any difference, it's always been reasonably quick.
But I have a feeling the motherboard may be the more likely culprit. It's not too old, and it's a Dell so hopefully a replacement shouldn't be that big a problem. Might still be quite expensive though, last time I needed a motherboard replaced it was about £100 - £150...

Yeah, I could probably check it in my girlfriend's laptop just to see (but to be honest I'm more of a software than hardware kind of guy and I worry about taking apart anything that still works just in case I break it XD)