Please help, my monitor has stopped working

[YapYap2023]

I have a laptop and have an extra screen plugged in. I struggle to use all my programmes with just one little laptop screen.

Last week when I woke the laptop up the monitor wouldn't come on and was saying no signal. I checked all the wires, all fine, in the end I shut the laptop down properly and restarted and the screan came back.

Its happened again this morning and I've shut down and restarted a couple of times and its not coming back.

Googling tells me its somethign to do with drivers or graphics cards, is this going to be an easy fix or something I can do myself? Or can I just get a new screen? I wanted to add a 3rd or get a new big one anyway.

Thank you.

Unfortunately, there are several things which could have failed - the laptop, the cables or the screen. Before you buy anything new, it would be a really good idea to test your laptop with another screen, and also test your screen with a different laptop, as well as switching out the cables. Then at least you'll know where the problem is; if you're lucky, it could be a hardware fault with the HDMI cable (they're fairly cheap to replace), but it's hard to diagnose from here.

😫
Thank you.

The power to the screen is on and when I press the button it comes up with text on the screen, saying checking signal then no signal.

How are you getting the signal from the laptop to the monitor? HDMI cable? Does your laptop have an HDMI socket, or do you plug in a converter? Just thinking of all the bits that could fail - could also be the HDMI socket (not seen that fail, but I have had USB sockets stop working)

You could try a full reboot of the laptop, take the batteries out, leave for a couple of minutes and put back. If restarting the laptop fixed it last time.

Have there been updates that might have changed things, that you could roll back on and check?

Good advise above to try each component with another device.

Yes there is a hdmi cable.

do you have a telly, if so have you tried using that as the 2nd monitor?

I don't know if there have been updates, it hasn't done that don't turn off the computer thing.

I haven't got another monitor but i've got a tv, when my husband comes back in I can get him to help me try to hook up the tv. I don't really want to start dismantling my set up so will bring the tv to the desk.

If you try each part of the setup and think it's the laptop, it's worth trying to connect it to a monitor through a dongle/hub which goes into a USB socket, just to see if it's the socket itself.

I've changed the HDMI cable on the old monitor and no change.
I've switched the monitor for the TV, and tried both HDMI cables, no change.
I went to the display settings and the tv and monitor weren't detected, even when I clicked to detect manually.
I will try taking the battery out of the laptop next.

Ok, there's no battery to remove, its a thinkpad.

Its working, I did a troubleshoot thing through the Lenovo website and it did some updates 👏

Thank you everyone for your help 🙏