m15x (previous gen) having a weird problem

So I have an m15x about 6 months old and pretty happy with it so far. I installed windows 7 64bit and other than the lack of hybrid graphics support it was working just fine.

THE PROBLEM:
Earlier this evening the screen went dark and I assumed the display had just been put to sleep due to inactivity, which is normal for the power profile I was on. When I moved the mouse nothing appeared to happen but I then noticed I could faintly see the desktop and realized the lcd backlight just wasn't on. I tried restarting, doing a system restore to yesterday and resetting the cmos but it is stuck like this.

It should be noted that now also the keyboard works only sporadically and the touch controls are very slow to respond and the touch pad makes the cursor move around very choppily. These problems persist from boot up. Even the cmos loading screen is not backlit and I can't open the bios because the keyboard doesn't respond.

Forgive me if there are any formatting errors. Wrote the whole thing on my Droid.

 

Bump. Noone has ever heard of something like this? I need this computer for school and I'm really hoping I don't have some sort of catastrophic hardware failure.

 

Sounds like your display's backlight is done for. You'll need a new backlight or display. But the keyboard not working properly is also strange. May be a mainboard problem or something. In any case, if you're under warranty, call Tech support and have them repair it.

 

Your m15x is only 6 months old, so you still have warranty left. Call Alienware, send it in, and let them take a look at it.

 

Does anyone know what stuff they are able to backup from the hard drive? I have some electronic textbooks which are only able to be downloaded once and are only certified for use on a single machine. Are they going to be wiping my windows install etc?

I have the 3yr 24/7 warranty and I believe can have a tech come out to look at it. If they have to take the hardware back, what sort of turnaround time am I looking at?

 

If it is a hardware problem, they probably won't wipe your drive. I would really recommend that you do make a backup of your data though.

 

u should call and see if u can take out the hard drive. If they tell you to just back up the data instead just tell them that the back light is broken so you cant see anything on the screen so u wont be able to back up the files. They should agree to it pretty easily since you are only having a hard ware problem.

turn around time is usually how long it takes to get to them + 1 week + how long it takes to get to you.

so its usually 3 days to get to them. Then 5 business days for repair. And then another 3 days to get back to you.

I dunno if you can get a tech to come look at it since back when AW wasnt fully mergered with dell they didnt have any onsite technicians. Now that they merged with dell ask customer service if you can schedule a time for the on site technician. Tho i heard some of the onsite technicans are pretty bad tho.