My sister bought an Acer laptop last year around Christmas time and today when she went to turn it on she said the screen flickered then she couldn't see anything. I played around with it and we can get it to output to a regular monitor but nothing makes the screen show up. It sounds like some thing just went out. Since we can't seem to get anything out of Acer and I know my way around desktops and have taken apart LCD monitors before is there a common part that goes out that I can replace? Any advice would be appreciated. thanks

It's still probably under warrantee, which is why Acer is giving you the run-around. Personally, I'd just hound them until I got them to fix it under said warrantee. That said, two things come to mind: (1) The cable that connects the laptop to the LCD is either bad or loose, or (2) the backlight has gone out.

First of all, I would follow Razor23's advice. Check that the laptop is not still under warranty! If you want to attempt to repair yourself then you could also try replacing the inverter that powers the backlight. A failing voltage inverter can cause a dim screen, or a flickering screen which then goes black. Check to see if you can see a very faint image on the screen although the screen is dim (best tried by shining a torch through the back of the screen). This can help rule out problems with the video harness or you would be seeing no image at all on the screen, however faint. The inverter is fairly cheap to replace, therefore try this first before attempting to replace the backlight (if confident enough to replace the backlight as this is a very delicate job), or replacing the entire screen (which is often prohibitively expensive depending on the value of the laptop itself).

thanks for the help guys, this place is one of the friendliest places on the net.