Laptop display black (backlight on) at startup, but remote access is fine?

Question

Having a peculiar issue where a Dell laptop (Inspiron 15 N5050) with Windows 10, upon restart, has a black display. It's evident that the backlight is on, yet no image / video is being drawn to the display. The system logs in just fine and I can access the display via TeamViewer. Everything looks fine in the remote TeamViewer console.

I've found that if I press the power button, which sets the laptop to sleep, and then immediately wake it back up by pressing the power button again the display draws just fine and everything is back to normal.

Any idea what may cause this? I've updated the video drivers and checked power settings, but nothing has resolved this issue.

NOTE: Even after "updating" the graphics driver for the Intel HD 3000 chipset to an older version (I'd previously updated it to a more recent version discovered by Driver Booster in hopes that it would resolve this), the issue still remains. Even when the display driver was installed and the screen flashed off and then on again, the screen stayed black during the driver installation. Also pressing Fn-F1 (which switches video output) does not do anything.

Answer 1

So after a tremendous amount of digging, the same topic kept coming up: Download BIOS A05.

Unfortunately A05 is not available from the standard support page. It only has A03. I did see some mentions of hard drive problems with A05, but it seemed to be that the hard drive itself likely was the culprit, not the BIOS.

After a lot more hunting, I finally found the A05 download and this resolved the issue entirely. After updating the BIOS the display comes up with no problems in Windows 10.

Download from Dell:

http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/04/Drivers/DriversDetails?driverId=GMDG1

(Backup download: N5050A05.EXE)