Delll Inspiron 1520 Dark Screen

My daughter's Dell Inspiron 1520, running Vista, has a very dark screen. The only way she can see anything on screen is to shine a bright light directly into the screen. I've tried to adjust the brightness setting using the Fn and arrow - but no luck. Any suggestions?

 

Sounds like your LCD backlight is dead. Are you still under warranty?

 

Hopefully you went and got the longer better warranty, else you are probably out of luck here and will need to replace the backlight. You could do this repair youself but it will be tricky.

 

how about other operation system may be XP or Linux?
The same issue persist or?

 

Unfortunately, No. Her warranty expired in November.

 

That's the reason I always get a warranty for as long as I intend to own a machine, but no sense giving you tons of after the fact advice...

You have four options (with minute variations of each possible)

1. Replace the LCD completely using a site like eBay. The biggest drawback is you don't know the screen history so you could be in the same position again very quickly.
2. Pay Dell an insane fee to get a replacement screen. It will be a refurbished screen with only a 90 day warranty which isn't long enough to justify the costs.
3. Buy a new backlight and install it yourself (or have it installed somewhere else). Will probably have no warranty or one that would be hard to use (you'd have to remove the backlight and return just that for coverage). So this would probably be as expensive as the Dell option above.
4. Your last option is to buy a new laptop... This time be sure to warrant for as long as you intend to actively use. For me I replace my laptops on a rolling 3 year schedule so I always have a 3 year warranty. Selling them on eBay with some warranty left on them usually nets me a higher return as well (compared to similar out of warranty machines).