Win 7 fails to boot, black screen

[Zaker172]

My mothers laptop (Dell Inspirion N5110, I think it's the one) started to act weird a couple of days ago. My friend was playing some games DOTA2 and Civ 5, TL2. So far it's all ok. The next day we come home and we turn the laptop on, it shows the Dell loading screen and then the black screen and we can leave it like that as long as we want. After that I tried to specificaly set it to boot from HDD, nothing. Then I tried the included diagnostics. Everyhthing came up fine. Desperate I closed it up and rebooted yet again. But suddenly it booted and everything was fine. I quickly forgot it and we continued to game. Today I try turning it up and again.. blackscreen.. tried rebooting a couple of times, nothing. Tried the diagnostics for some magic, nothing. tried rebooting a couple of times more and then it worked.. Does anyone know what could be the problem? Everything seems to run fine besides that.

 

[altereDad]

Does it sound like it's still running? Any beeps on boot?
Also, plug it up to a monitor and see if the monitor works.
Do keys look like they function and respond (light up in areas like enabling caps)?

 

[Bang]

I had a similar experience with a monitor. Turns out the monitor was getting too hot (age) and refused to work till it was shut off and cooled down a bit. Try plugging a second monitor into the lappy's VGA socket. See how she goes.

 

[dragoonk]

So you see the loading screen at first but when Window should start booting nothing happens? Maybe Windows has an issue booting, but first you must rule out any potential hardware problem. Plug in a Monitor, see how that goes, if the problem continues then it just might need a fresh Windows install.

 

[critical]

The laptop screen backlight might be failing.