Early on Sunday morning, I got a call from a customer in Shailer Park. She had an assignment due the next day, and her 13-inch Dell XPS had suddenly stopped giving her a usable picture. The XPS logo would appear, the screen would go black, and the Caps Lock light would flash twice amber and seven times white. On this model, that’s Dell’s display fault code.
She wondered if her cat had walked across the keyboard. It was possible that pressure on the chassis had disturbed an already marginal connection, but I couldn’t establish what caused the fault. The first real clue came after a couple of starts, when I heard the Windows lock-screen sound from the laptop. Windows was starting even though we couldn’t see it.
The built-in screen cycled through solid colours in Dell’s self-test, so I checked and reseated the internal display connector. The fault returned. I then connected an external monitor with a USB‑C to HDMI cable, and up came the Windows lock screen. The laptop’s own screen still needed repair, but she could get back into Windows and back up her files.
That mattered because the SSD in this Dell is soldered to the motherboard. If the laptop had stopped booting altogether, I couldn’t have simply removed the drive and plugged it into another computer. She had around 36 GB of data and only 5 GB of OneDrive storage, which wasn’t enough to keep a copy of everything she wanted to protect.
Whether you use OneDrive, Google Drive or an external backup drive, make sure there’s enough room for the files you want to protect. If you use cloud storage, sign in from another device occasionally and open a few important files to check they’ve actually synced. That’s a much easier check to make on a quiet Sunday than the day before an assignment is due.
