inspiron 1440z

Bought a Dell 1440z (refurb) about 2 months ago, for my mother-in-law.
She'd been having all sorts of trouble dialing in to her ISP (peoplepc.com), but we figured it was mostly because she lives out in the middle of nowhere, and they'd had phone-line trouble not too long before that.

So anyways, today I was out at her house to see if I could figure out what was wrong, and when she tried to start the laptop, we could hear fans and disk spin up, but nothing on the display.

Brought it home, and before I contacted Dell, figured I'd hook up an external monitor, and see if that worked. Sure enough, it did -- got the usual bios splash screen, and then a message that the battery was critically low (it had been plugged in at the other house). Plugged in the power-cord, and the pc had already shut off by this point. Started it back up (still connected to external monitor), and at the point where windows normally comes to life, the display switched on it's own back to the built-in screen.

Everything was working fine on the built-in screen... I grabbed her email, made sure windows-update was happy, did a full virus scan, and called to tell the m-i-l that I could drop the pc back off yet this evening.

Then an idea occurred to me -- will the laptop start WITHOUT an external screen connected. Answer: nope. I can see that the backlight is powered, because the brightness changes a bit, but nothing else. I do hear the old windows 'chime', but the screen stays blank.

Ideas?

 

Send it back IMO, you have a 1 year warranty.

 

> Send it back IMO, you have a 1 year warranty.

I was hoping to make that a last resort -- I've endured enough painful tech-support calls, that I'm never eager to jump into another one!

At any rate, I did do the 'Chat with Tech Support', it was absolutely painless, and Dell said they'll send me a pre-paid shipping box in two business days.