I recently got a laptop and all has been well until now. when the laptop is on even while using it, the screen will all of a sudden go black, If you look closely at the screen you can see all the open windows/desktop but the bloody thing wont light up again unless you restart it. I've done a bit of searching and found that it is more than likely a failed inverter, can anyone confirm this?

cheers

I guess that could be the reason, but you might want to check your powersettings first. I had the exact same problem with my (somewhat crappy) laptop. I just disabled all the automatic standbye settings for the screen and the problem was over.

yeah done that, set everything to never turn off, disabled standbye/hibernation settings and it still occured. it's a dell latitude CPx, P3 500, 128mb ram, ATI rage video. I noticed that when I closed the screen then opened it again the screen lit up again but the dam thing shut down.

Dell must be clueless about this - I have a D810 Latitude laptop with the ATI Radeon X600 video - after intermittent failures over several months, the LCD finally died last week. An external monitor works fine, and the LCD works in safe mode. Otherwise, the computer goes into sleep mode after the XP splash screen. Over two days, Dell replaced the motherboard, video card, and LCD screen and played around swapping memory cards - the problem persists. They then told me the problem was corrupted drivers, and wanted me to re-image (format) my hard drive. I swapped hard drives with an associate's D810 and proved to Dell it IS a hardware problem. I am now awaiting a replacement computer under warranty.

Installation of the latest video driver software from Dell totally hosed the laptop, and I had to do a restore.

The service technician also warned me that the 60gb Hitachi hard drive has a 50% failure rate (but they won't replace it until it fails!). So, if you have a Hitachi HD, better do a drive image onto DVDs or a portable drive.