Comment 17 for bug 83726

According to this, your laptop is probably using an ATI radeon 9200:
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c00059853&lc=en&cc=us&dlc=&product=389767

Looking through the X radeon/dpms bugs on freedesktop.org, it seems there are lots of reports of blanking issues on startup, however none exactly match our issue.

I've noticed that after letting synaptic update everything, I'm no longer able to reproduce the bug (even with the LiveCD, which is odd).