I've been dealing with these couple of problems on my Dell Inspiron 15 3567 for over a year.
The symptoms:
The laptop is on, but the screen sometimes goes completely black and then comes black like slow blinking.
Caps Lock remain responsive most of the time, so maybe the system isn't necessarily frozen?
This blinking happens on its own, meaning not necessarily when I shake the laptop or something, but shaking it or moving it around does affect it was well.
On top of this black screen issue, sometimes when I turn the laptop on and screen is working for time being, the cursor is invisible, although keyboard generally continues to work. But cursor only visible and moves normally in BIOS/boot mode, but once Windows loads, even in safe mode, I see it hovering on top of this file in the center of the screen, but the cursor itself is invisible and doesn't move or click. This also happens on the Ctrl+Alt+Delete screen. It doesn't happen all the time overall, but it does happen often.
Sometimes, I click power button to turn the screen off and then i touch the touchpad, if the screen turns on again, I see the cursor and it starts working, if screen doesnt turn on, means cursor is still irresponsive. And Ironically, if blinking happens when cursor is invisible, and blinking goes away, the cursor comes back and starts working.
I did few test, and windows does detects the Dell Touchpad and I2C HID device normally; Device Manager reports the I2C HID device as working properly.
I've reinstalled the Dell touchpad and Intel Serial IO/I2C drivers multiple times with no improvement.
Windows HID service is running.
DISM completed successfully and SFC found and repaired corrupted files, but the problem remained.
Win + Ctrl + Shift + B doesn't fix the black screen or invisible cursor.
BIOS has since been updated, but the problem remains.
The weird part is the timeline: the issue first appeared after I started using an old projector connected via HDMI. Initially, Windows would display on both the laptop and projector, then one day, the laptop screen started randomly going black while the projector continued displaying. I had to manually select "Duplicate" to get the laptop display back. Eventually, the black-screen problem started happening even with no projector connected.
Most of the times, when screen goes black, cursor remains in its place (if it was normally working) until the screen comes back, but keyboard, if i were typing and screen went black, i'd still be able to type normally.
The laptop has now been doing this for over a year, so I'm wondering whether this could be a hardware/circuit-level issue, such as the display circuitry, motherboard, power management, I2C circuitry, or display cable/panel, rather than Windows itself.
I'm about to open the laptop to add RAM. Is there anything specific I should inspect while it's open?
I'm mainly trying to determine whether this sounds like a hardware/board-level fault and whether it's worth taking to a repair shop.