Hi. I have a Dell Inspiron 6000 that's about three years old. Starting a few days ago, the monitor pretty much refuses to light up if I have it plugged in. If I start it up with it plugged in, the screen lights up intermittently during the startup, then quits once my desktop appears. If I want it to light up again, I have to shut it so it goes into sleep mode. When I open it again, if I have unplugged it, it will light up in power-save mode just fine.

Any idea what is going on here? I've tried a friend's power cord, and that does not appear to change things. I'm running Windows XP. I'm not sure how that would affect anything, but I really have no idea why this would be occurring.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

check if you see the picture on the screen it will be very dim. Also dose it pick up a external monitor connected to the back of the laptop.

I would try pluging it in to a different monitor, if that dosnt work then maybe your psu is dieing, but if it work fine on a different monitor then your monitor is going bad. Is it flat screen? or Tube?

Thanks for the responses. Yes, if I look very close it is really, really dim. I haven't tried to hook it up to another monitor yet (this is a flat screen). I'll give that a shot when I get to one. Unfortunately for these purposes, it can't completely be relied on to fail--it's working right now for instance--so I'll have to spend a lot of time on another monitor before I'm sure.

If this helps diagnose it, please let me know. Thanks again.