All right, this is my last option. I purchased a Dell Inspiron 1520 aproximately 1.5 years ago and after about a year the screen began to randomly go very dark and almost completely black after simply moving the laptop or sometimes without touching it at all. I decided that since my warranty had expired with Dell that I would bring it to a local computer shop in my hometown and the guy who performed the work on my computer said that it was a simple software issue and that he had fixed it for only $60! Well he was full of $h1+! I am currently at college 5 hours away from home and this is a huge issue for me, this guy said that he could fix it for free within a month of him performing the "fix" on it if I had anymore issues with it but it only started happening again after a month! Can someone please help me out and tell me that it will be cheap? If not I am switching to a Mac because Dell is clearly BUNK!

It's a hardware problem. Either the backlight or the power supply for it. Hope you have better luck with a Mac but you can get another laptop for half the price. A have had 10 laptops going back over 15 years and I have yet to have a display failure.

Must be nice, I hate Dell..

"It's a hardware problem. Either the backlight or the power supply for it." I agree with the Wizard. It could be a poor cable connection. The cables from the motherboard to the display take a lot of punishment from the opening and closing of the laptop.

I think you had a bad experience. Probably because of a bad repairman. Lapto[s are fairly reliable consider the abuse they take. The problems I have is with battery life in the older ones, 12 to 18 years old, 1 keyboard with occasion intermittent keys, about 9 year old. My experience with Dell is fairly good. The first one was a hand me down reconditioned 11 yrs old, the second the one with the bad keyboard 9 years old, the third a year old.